Barack Obama intensifies focus on women voters at economic forum

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/06/barack-obama-women-voters-jobs

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Barack Obama intensified his push to win over women voters on Friday by claiming to have saved them from the worst of the recession, promoted greater equality at work and defended better access to healthcare.

Speaking at a White House forum on women and the economy, the president sought to build on polls that show growing support among independent women voters after what has been described as a Republican "war on women".

Republicans alienated many with an assault on access to contraception, threats to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood and with new attempts to intimidate women seeking abortions in some states. The threat of further cuts to services has also undermined support.

Opinion polls show that Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential candidate, is losing the lead he held among independent women in recent weeks.

At the end of last year, Romney had a five percentage point advantage among women who describe themselves as independent voters, a primary target of both campaigns. Polls this week gave Obama a 14-point lead with the same group.

Obama ticked off the continuing discrimination against women in winning equal pay, in education and in business – from rising up the corporate ladder to obtaining loans to launch their own firms. He said that discrimination against women has an impact on all Americans.

"When women make less than men for the same work, that hurts families who have to get by with less and businesses who have fewer customers with less to spend. When a job doesn't offer family leave to care for a new baby or sick leave to care for an ailing parent, that burdens men as well," the president said. "When an insurance plan denies women coverage because of pre-existing conditions, that puts a strain on emergency rooms and drives up costs of care for everybody.

"When any of our citizens can't fulfill the potential that they have because of factors that have nothing to do with talent, or character, or work ethic, that diminishes us all. It holds all of us back. And it says something about who we are as Americans."

The president then zeroed in on continuing discrimination against women in pay. "Right now, women are a growing number of breadwinners in the household, but they're still earning just 77 cents for every dollar a man does – even less if you're an African American or Latina woman. Overall, a woman with a college degree doing the same work as a man will earn hundreds of thousands of dollars less over the course of her career," he said.

"So closing this pay gap – ending pay discrimination – is about far more than simple fairness. When more women are bringing home the bacon, but bringing home less of it than men who are doing the same work, that weakens families, it weakens communities, it's tough on our kids, it weakens our entire economy."

Obama said that was why the first bill he signed into law as president was a fair pay act that required equal pay for equal work.

But the real battle ground of recent weeks has been over health. Obama won about 56% of votes by women in the 2008 election but the Democrats lost that advantage in the 2010 midterm elections.

In recent weeks the numbers have swung back to Obama in the wake of what was widely viewed as the misogynistic debate around access to contraception under the president's healthcare law, which saw Rush Limbaugh – the radio talk show host who is a voice of the Republican right – calling a student a "prostitute" for appearing before Congress to appeal for the pill to be covered by all health insurance plans.

The Republicans have also taken a battering over state legislature attempts to raise new barriers to abortions and threats to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood because it carries out abortions, even though none of them are paid for with government money. The attempts to defund Planned Parenthood would hit its other services such as mammograms.

Then there is the wider Republican assault on Obama's health legislation.<br />"When people talk about repealing healthcare reform, they're not just saying we should stop protecting women with pre-existing conditions; they're also saying we should kick about a million young women off their parent's healthcare plans," said Obama.

"When people say we should get rid of Planned Parenthood, they're not just talking about restricting a woman's ability to make her own health decision; they're talking about denying, as a practical matter, the preventive care, like mammograms, that millions of women rely on."

The Republican leadership has dismissed charges that the party is conducting a "war on women". But the party chairman, Reince Priebus, drew more criticism when he likened the accusations to a "war on caterpillars".

"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," he told Bloomberg television. "It's a fiction."

The Democratic party chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, shot back by accusing Priebus of demeaning women and the issues with the comparison.

"To have the head of the GOP say these attacks on women are as fictional as a 'war on caterpillars' is callous and dismissive of what matters to women and completely out of touch," she said.

Joan Entmacher, vice-president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, praised Obama initiatives to help people through the recession, saying that it had a major impact on women by providing aid for education and medical assistance, and in preventing big lay offs in the public sector where many women are employed. She said expanded aid for low income families also particularly benefited women.

But Entmacher said that women have had a harder time of it than men in getting past the recession, which she blamed on Republicans in Congress for blocking funding for recovery programmes. Women have gained only about one in three of new jobs since the recovery began.

"The recession was harder on men but the recovery has been slower for women," she said.

Entmacher said that while the recent public debate has focused more on health care, contraception and abortion, economic issues underpin how many women will vote.

"Polls show that overall women are more anxious about economic security at all stages of their life," she said. "Women are also generally more supportive of a government that provides help to people that need it, more concerned about protecting government services and less keen to cut taxes. There is a clear difference between the president's policies and the [Republican] policies that are in the budget that the House just passed that would dramatically cut back on a wide range of programmes that are especially important to women and further cut taxes for the very wealthy that would make it very difficult to avoid more painful cuts."