”You can be a former secretary of state, like Condoleezza Rice, or the first female Hispanic governor in America, like New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, but you're still just wrapping paper for the gift that is men.”

–DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz


This unhinged and insulting quote shows one of two things: (1.) that Ms. Wasserman Schultz is incapable of recognizing the achievements of women who don’t share her big government political philosophy, or (2.) Ms. Wasserman Schultz is taking speaking lessons from Vice President Joe Biden.

It's fair to say that most people who saw the Republican convention, or have watched Ms. Rice on the international stage, will have have a hard time seeing either Condoleezza Rice or Susana Martinez as “wrapping paper.”  Plus, I am scratching my head to figure out what DWS means by “the gift that is men.” But we do know what she's up to: making women, a “minority” that comprised a scant 54 percent of the voting public in 2008, recognize that they are oppressed and can only be saved by government dependency.

A piece by Karol Markowicz in the New York Post nails it:

Women are so important this year that one political side has accused the other of launching a “war” on them. You know you matter when there’s a war over you.

Oh, and the Democratic National Committee hired a plane to fly over the Republican National Committee’s convention in Tampa carrying the banner “Romney, Ryan, Akin: Too extreme for woman [sic].”

Which woman exactly, they didn’t say. And apparently they’re not too extreme for men, but the weaker sex just can’t handle them.

There’s something more than a little distasteful about all this — as if, years after women’s liberation, we still can’t get by unless big, strong men (who most likely work for the big, strong government) come and take care of us.

What’s even more wild is that it’s the liberal side that is saying women just can’t go it alone. When the spotlight was on Sandra Fluke, it was embarrassing to watch an educated, 30-year-old woman say she was unable to fund her own birth control and would need the men listening to her testimony to step in and help her.

The Democratic Party’s "war on women" rhetoric seems like something out of the 1960s or ‘70s. It is likely to resonate most with older, liberal women, the ones who still long to see personal fulfillment through the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, even though women outnumber men on college campuses and are steadily moving to fill top executive positions throughout the nation.

Indeed, there is a certain nostalgia in the Democrats' claims of a war on women. But it's risky. Many women realize that the biggest threats to our continued wellbeing are slow economic growth and high unemployment (it’s gone up 15 percent among women since President Obama was inaugurated).

Women are smart enough to realize that, if there is a war on women, it is the same war that is being waged on all citizens: the lousy economy, a sense that the current dismal state of affairs is the “new normal,” and a belief that we are hastening towards becoming Greece (or California).

If women are to continue to climb the corporate ladder, that ladder needs to continue to have rungs.