Obama campaign looks to mobilize Virginia women
With women’s issues making headlines in Virginia and throughout the country in this election year, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is taking steps to engage and mobilize women voters in the battleground state.
The campaign later this month will formally announce a Virginia “Women for Obama” effort that will be co-chaired by Lisa Collis, the wife of U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, and former state Del. Jean Cunningham of Richmond. A formal announcement will take place at an April 30 event in Northern Virginia.
President Barack Obama
Democrats are making a concerted effort to involve women voters in a year when issues such as abortion rights, insurance coverage for contraception, and equal pay have generated heated debates. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted last month, women voters favored Obama over presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by a margin of 52 percent to 39 percent.
In Virginia, a new political action committee called the Women’s Strike Force was formed after the General Assembly passed legislation requiring women to submit to an ultrasound procedure before having an abortion. The controversial legislation triggered protests at the state Capitol in Richmond and brought national media attention to the legislature and Gov. Bob McDonnell.
Obama’s campaign has been hitting Romney for declaring he would eliminate public funding for Planned Parenthood and for supporting a Senate amendment that would allow employers to opt out of providing contraception coverage in its employee insurance plans. Romney’s campaign has pushed back by arguing that women have suffered disproportionately under Obama’s economic policies
“Women’s votes are crucial in every election, but this year even more is at stake as we’ve seen Republicans go after our rights time and time again,” said Jennifer Kohl, the Virginia communications director for the Obama campaign. “While President Obama has been fighting to level the playing field for women and stand up for our rights, Mitt Romney and Bob McDonnell have been re-fighting cultural battles that ended decades ago and have championed policies that reduce our freedoms.”
Mitt Romney (AP photo)
The statewide Women for Obama group includes Victoria Cochran of Blacksburg.
“The choice for women in November could not be any clearer,” Cochran said. “President Obama has consistently been looking out for women young and old, whether through the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helps women fight for equal pay for equal work, or through championing historic health reform to provide us access to critical preventive care and keep insurance companies from charging us more than men for the same coverage.”
–Michael Sluss
April 20, 2012 - 8:00 PM
Just more Obama crap! Women wake up, simply another election con. Be honest, if not for his candidancy again this year, do you actually think he would be your “Champion for Women causes”? All this country needs, another PAC!
Put a bunch of old conservative white men in a room deciding womens reproductive needs and what do you expect? Another fake orgasm? I don’t think so. You reap what you sow GOP.
“Women wake up”
I think they have. Republicans have introduced nearly one thousand bills curtailing women’s reproductive rights. Now THAT’S disgusting.
Women will be important to Obama (as always) and they will be the nail in Romney’s shoe IMO. Women are more than a little aware already of the true “war on women” from the TPGOP and they will be made moreso by the campaign. Romney cannot undo all the damage he and his opponents already inflicted on him.
Women are smart enough to know what is and is not Obama’s fault. Women remember what the Wall Street influence and greed did to this nation and in the end, only the blindly right wing ideological women will vote for Romney.
That is my prediction.
…oh, come on Sandi, get a clue. When Obama initiated the “Fair Pay Act” it was just rhetoric aimed at gaining the womens vote. (Obviously, it worked on you.) When Obama’s administration initiated the “Fair Pay Act”, do you know what he actually did? Obama acknowledged that the highest office in the United States of America – the President of the U.S. of A. – knows that companies are violating the Fair Pay Act of 1963. With this knowledge, what did our president do? Did he initate action that would take steps to punish those companies that do not abide by the Fair Pay Act of 1963? No…he just came up with a duplicate ‘law’. i.e. 1) our President has admitted he knows women are not receiving equal pay as directed under the Fair Pay Act of 1963- he has admitted he knows companies are violating the Fair Pay Act of 1963; 2) despite knowing women are not receiving equal pay under the Fair Pay Act of 1963, our President is not taking any action against the companies who are in violation of the Fair Pay Act of 1963! We don’t need another law/act – what good are the laws/acts if they are not enforced? What we need is enforcement of the Fair Pay Act of 1963…not the lip service Obama gives in order to pursuade women to vote for him. A vote for Obama is a vote for socialism and a vote against democracy. The United States of America is a democracy. If you want to live in a socialist country move to the USSR (or some other European country with a socialist agenda).
“A vote for Obama is a vote for socialism and a vote against democracy. The United States of America is a democracy.”
Actually, no, it’s not a democracy, and “democracy” and “socialism” aren’t mutually exclusive anyway. And psst….the USSR has been gone for decades. Please update your “Red Threat” talking points…thanks in advance.
The United States is a republic, not a democracy.
Heidi M. Stierman, it appears that you are the one who needs to “get a clue”.
First, it is hardly the Ledbetter Act that I was speaking of, that is just one of many assaults on privacy and women by the TP/R’s.
But since you brought it up, the Act President Obama signed was to amend the previous law’s 180-day statute of limitations which is what sunk Lily Ledbetter’s good case.
There was a subsequent bill, also called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, to supersede the decision, so she could pursue her case, but the Dems did not have the required 60 votes so it died there.
Not for nothing Heidi, but the President is not the one who “enforces” any law.
There is not a developed nation on earth that does not have a mixed government and economy. There are no “free market nations” and there are no totally “socialist nations”. You are falling for talking points and it is always a dead giveaway when you tell people to move to “move to the USSR”. I am a proud liberal American and I am staying right here.