Mitt Romney launched a direct assault on the Obama campaign’s effort to portray Republican positions as anti-women, saying the real “war on women” started with the president’s “failure on the economy.”
Romney, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, made the comments Tuesday at a town hall meeting in Delaware where he sought to reverse a trend in the polls that show women voters turning toward President Barack Obama in numbers that could be difficult to overcome in the November election.
“There’s been some talk about a war on women,” Romney said, according to a report by
The Hill newspaper. “The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy.”
According to recent polls, Romney trails Obama across the country in key swing states by at least nine points. But the biggest gap between Romney and the president shows up among women, who support Obama by at least 18 percent over the former Massachusetts governor.
The Democrats, the Hill reported Wednesday, have exploited the recent controversy over contraception and other issues related to women to suggest that Republicans are waging a “war on women” in this year’s election.
But Romney, using his main campaign theme on the economy to make his point, said at his town hall gathering that the president’s economic policies had put more women out of work than men.
“Do you know what percent of job losses in the Obama years have been casualties of women losing jobs as opposed to men?” Romney asked his audience at one point.
“92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years have been women who lost those jobs. The real war on women has been the job losses as a result of the Obama economy,” he declared.
According to the Hill, Romney’s claim was based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics report noting that there are 740,000 fewer non-farm payroll jobs now than in 2009, when Obama took office. During the same time period, 683,000 women lost their jobs.
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