Random L.A. Times reporter Faye Fiore worries that Willard is too perfect:
By central-casting standards, the former Massachusetts governor is the perfect presidential specimen — a comforting throwback to the 1950s, when nobody got divorced (they fell in love in high school and that was it), mothers stayed at home (he dubbed Ann the Romney CFO — chief family officer) and the greatest parental challenge was making the boys practice their piano (Ann used to pinch their necks ).
This is the tragedy of the Republican Party in 2007: locked in worship of the 1950s, when women stayed at home and white men told the rest of the country to hand them a putter.
We’ve moved beyond those days — we need everyone to participate in our economy and our society today, if we’re to have a chance in the globalized economy, for one thing — and the faster the Republicans recognize that the better. In the meantime, as the unnatural coalition between the fanatics of the religious right and corporate America fashioned by Bush, Rove and Cheney splinters before our eyes, it is entertaining to watch His Expediency campaign like a modern Rip van Winkle.
we need everyone to participate in our economy and our society today, if we’re to have a chance in the globalized economy
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p>really? I think forcing us into two-income families hurts our chances in the global economy, because it forces us to offshore all the actual labor while we turn every job in the US into a marketing/legal corporate androgynous desk job. In the fifties we had industry here, husbands mowed lawns, wives sewed, etc. Now that’s done by illegal immigrants and fifteen year old Chinese girls. Feminism may have helped the economy, if by economy you mean the Hollywood economy of capitalism and imperialistic globalization. But a sustainable, local economy might be more competitive in the long term, and fairer for third world countries that have to pick up the hard labor that we have slacked off on.
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p>I agree that’s an unnatural coalition, the religious right needs to ditch corporate America and become the religious left, and the left needs to figure out how to assimilate them. That can only be done by the left ditching corporate global feminism too. The whole world will breathe a sigh of relief, no one likes having to work so hard to keep up with the Jones-Smiths.
Personally I think more people should get married, stay married, and raise their kids thats a much better model then the endless cycle of out of wedlock children, divorces, absent husbands, fathers, etc. that I see daily on the South Side of Chicago and even saw back home in Cambridge starting in my high school with teen mothers etc.
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p>The difference between liberalism and conservatism is that unlike Romney we will offer more than just platitudes and examples we can and will expand economic opportunity to deter people from the temptations of drugs, easy sex, etc.
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p>I can’t agree that 1950s morality should be chided in some way, I would much rather have stable nuclear families form the nucleus of a revived middle class than live in an America where the family is replaced either by government institutions like welfare and public schools or by criminal institutions like gangs. The approach must be dualistic; a liberal cant just throw more government money at the problem and then turn a blind eye to the moral decay that is pervasive in poorer communities and the conservative can’t just chide the moral decay and then ignore the economic circumstances that cause it.
when women who graduated third in their class from Stanford Law School could only find jobs as legal secretaries.
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p>Honestly, jconway, your youth is showing.
One of Josh Marshall’s readers at TPM offered what sounds like a very accurate description of the modus operandi of the Romney: