I was embarrassed by the way my own side acted like Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”, by treating it as anything more than slightly inarticulate. I mean, they didn’t go to the GOP level of idiocy of intentionally misunderstanding “You didn’t build that”, but the degree to which people pretended to not understand what Romney was saying was silly.
Here’s what Dukakis was supposed to say:
Let me tell you two stories. The first is about a 70 year old doctor in his office one night , bound and gagged by a robber looking for drugs. The second is about a guy in his 40s cut down by a driver on drugs or drinking. The first was my father, the second was my brother! I don’t need any lectures from George Bush or anyone else about crime or its victims or its cost.
My cite is the excellent book about the 1988 election, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?
It’d be nice to go back to the old days when a GOP presidential candidate committed a gaffe by talking about hiring more women for important positions.
Romney had a number of quotes which, if you looked at the context and what he was trying to say, were actually reasonable… but which were also really, really easy to take out of context, and which looked really bad out of that context.
Example 1: “Corporations are people, my friend”. What he meant to say was that corporations are made up of people. If, say Chrysler goes out of business, it doesn’t just hurt the CEO: It also hurts the assembly-line workers and the dealers and the janitors at the factory, and indirectly the iron-miners and the petroleum workers. But it comes across as being about corporate personhood, and makes it sound like he’s valuing abstractions over real, flesh-and-blood people.
Example 2: “I like firing people”. What he meant was that he likes being in a sufficiently-secure position that he’s able to fire people, and that if one of his workers is incompetent, he can replace him with someone more competent, thus making everything run more smoothly and efficiently. But it comes across as meaning that he takes a sadistic glee in ruining peoples’ lives, and will go looking for excuses to fire people unnecessarily.
Now, in both cases, what he meant was fine, or at least reasonable, but the fact that he’d say them in ways that were so easily misinterpreted is a sign of incompetence at politics.
Now, see, I took offense at that statement, but not because it was inarticulate. Romney was this very successful businessman – that was part of his persona and was supposed to support how successful he’d be at POTUS. So why did he need binders full of women? Why couldn’t he just go to his rolodex to get the phone numbers of the many, many women he’d done business with or whose foundations he supported or with whom he’d had other professional contact?
The fact that he had to have others find bindersful of women meant to me that he had not had professional contact with many women – and yeah, that’s concerning. And the fact that he didn’t realize that this said volumes about his attitude toward women was also concerning.
I fail to see a meaningful difference between binders and Rolodexes as a means of storing contact information on business associates.
Example 1: Except that Romney was not talking about the ordinary people who make up corporations. He was talking about Citizens United, which was about allowing corporations to spend money to influence elections. Do you think the assembly line worker and the janitor are involved in that?
Example 2: While you could charitably interpret this the way you did, it also resonates with his career at Bain Capital, which was all about firing perfectly good, productive employees as part of a strategy of raping corporate acquisitions to make as much money as possible, damn the consequences.
OK, in 2012, anyone who is literally using either binders or rolodexes to keep track of peoples’ contact information, is fucked up. I think we can agree on that. Was Romney listening to cassette tapes of Hootie and the Blowfish while he was going through the binders?
Except he didn’t go to binders he already had that held the contact information.
He had to go out to find women that were qualified to be on his Cabinet in Massachusetts – he did not have a list of qualified women he had worked with in the past.
You’re making distinctions that make no difference. He was relaying (full quote below) that there are too many men in the cabinet as governor and he wanted more women. He didn’t personally know all the potential candidates for any given position and nor should he. He, as any governor should, asked his folks to bring him potential candidates and specifically asked them to focus on female candidates. That they arrived in binders and not a rolodex seems like a stunningly weird thing to focus on. It was maybe, possibly, slightly inarticulate, but I agree with the sentiment, and it was a ridiculous thing to make a big deal about. Seems almost quaint that a Republican actually had this sort of thought process once upon a time.
Thank you and important topic. And one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state. Because I had the chance to pull together a Cabinet, and all of the applicants seemed to be men. And I went to my staff and I said: “How come all of the people for these jobs are all men?” They said: “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said: “Well gosh, can’t we find some women that are also qualified?” And we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our Cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said: “Can you help us find folks?” And they brought us whole* binders full of women**.*
That wasn’t my impression, my impression is he was talking about the owners of corporations getting to enjoy corporate profits. He was talking about how the wealthy are people. Which is true, but it doesn’t negate the fact that the GOP are a plutocratic party, it just verifies it.
What Dukakiss should have said:
“First of all, personally, I’d want to kill the son of a bitch. But the law doesn’t exist as an instrument of personal vengeance, for me or for anybody else. And I recognize that even if others don’t. Secondly, asking a presidential candidate to speculate on how he’d feel if his wife were raped and murdered is an appalling question and you should be ashamed of yourself for asking it.”
John Kerry later got asked a similar question in a state AG race I believe and gave an answer like that. No one will ever get caught flatfooted by that one again.
Hopefully one of the silver linings of the Trump Presidency will be that gaffes don’t matter anymore. If there was ever a time for Joe Biden to run and not bother with his already faulty filter, it’s 2020. Frankly, I think most Americans appreciate candor. I think gaffes also tend to hurt more than when you’re trying to be disciplined. Voters see gaffes by such candidates are closer to their true persona, whereas a candidate who speaks more frankly probably gets more of the benefit of the doubt. Romney was hurt precisely because he was so fake as a candidate.
Now now. I am sure Trump has many many many binders full of women. And excel spreadsheets and databases.
If anything, the calm response by Dukakis seemed more presidential.
Both of these would have been excellent responses. A natural politician like Bill Clinton would have responded in that vein without a moment’s hesitation.
While I agree he did an admirable thing in getting more women into his cabinet, I still think (and thought at the time) that the fact he had to go out and have others find qualified women for him speaks about his attitude towards women in his business, and that some of that attitude was likely to spill over into his administration.
It wasn’t that he had to have his contacts go out to find him potential candidates in general – they had already done that, and the list they delivered was almost entirely male. Who were his trusted contacts that knew only males that were qualified? Why did his trusted contacts assume that this bias would be acceptable to Mitt? The answer to that seems to me that they looked at the kind of people he had as executives and concluded that he preferred to work with males.
If you read his full quote, the story is very clear. It’s not that he didn’t know any women to fill the cabinet, it’s that he didn’t have any personal list of people at all to fill the cabinet. So, he asked his people to provide him with good options, and they came back with a bunch of men. He asked for more qualified women, and reached out to women’s groups. And qualified women were so easy to find that he was provided binders full of them. I find his reaction and his statement are entirely admirable, and no, I did not vote for him.
Bush 41 at the grocery store. He was impressed by a new model of scanner that could read mangled bar codes, not by the fact that there were machines that could read bar codes at all. But the story reinforced the idea he was out of touch with ordinary people, so that’s where it went…