John Boehner, call your office.
Less than one week after the National Republican Congressional Committee and Speaker Boehner began holding sessions where Republican aides were taught about “messaging against women opponents,” Iowa Senate candidate Mark Jacobs revealed his strategy on how to speak to women.
“I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level, and with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that,” Jacobs said in a local television interview Sunday.
Jacobs, the former CEO of Reliant Energy, announced his campaign last month, and told supporters that his message of economic growth and opportunity would resonate with voters who were fed up with the dysfunction in Washington. But ahead of the 2014 election, Jacobs will need to direct attention away from his cringe-worthy comment–something that damaged Republicans in the last election after multiple male candidates spoke out about rape and pregnancies.
On Tuesday, the American Bridge PAC released a video that resurfaced more examples of the GOP’s war on women, including Missouri Senate candidate and former congressman Todd Akin’s comment about how women’s bodies could shut down if they were “legitimately raped,” and Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s suggestion that rape pregnancies were God’s will.
Boehner told the press last week that his male colleagues needed to be “a little more sensitive” before speaking off the cuff. “You know, you look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democratic caucus than there are in the Republican conference,” Boehner said. “And some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney responded last week by pointing out that the problem was with Republican policies, and a course in language would not change the party.
“One way that [the GOP] could support women today is to vote to raise the minimum wage, because women disproportionately benefit from increases in the minimum wage. One thing they could do to support women in America is to stop trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and instead work with lawmakers who want to make it work as effectively as possible, because the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance companies from charging women double for the same insurance policies that men receive,” he said.
Traci Lee