There’s ample evidence that the Republican policy campaign known as the “war on women” has taken a toll on the GOP’s standing with more than half the electorate. Republican leaders, however, still seem unsure how to talk about their problem.
The leaders of the two political parties clashed over the role of gender in U.S. elections, with the Democrat saying her opponents have been “shockingly out of touch” on women’s issues and the Republican saying Democrats and the media have created a phony conflict.
“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s a fiction.”
This is becoming a popular defense — denial. War on women? What war on women? Democrats and the media just made this whole story up. It’s what South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) argued this week, and it’s the line Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the only woman in the Republican leadership in either chamber, adopted two weeks ago.
It’s also wrong.









