The results of the Florida Republican presidential primary show that while the ladies in the Palmetto State liked what Gingrich had to say as a candidate, the gals in the Sunshine State wanted another candidate to take to the general election prom.

I’m not the only one who’s likened the Republican presidential debate and campaign process to a very complicated version of The Dating Game. Almost every GOP candidate that’s tossed their hat in the ring has had a moment where the voters loved him or her, only to find themselves wondering what they’d done to blow their chances at going steady until the primary season, metaphorically standing alone outside the apartment door because their date had “an early morning.”

Gingrich’s turn to bask in the spotlight was the South Carolina primary in January, especially when it came to women’s votes. Even though studies have shown that Newt isn’t as popular with the ladies as his personal history might suggest, there must have been something about the twinkle in his eye when he called Barack Obama “the food stamp president,” because he won the support of Georgia’s women voters 36 percent to Mitt Romney’s 30 percent.

But while South Carolina voters might have thought Gingrich was the type they’d want to go on a second date with (to the general election), women voters in Florida weren’t convinced.

According to exit polling, Romney was the hot political suitor of Florida’s women voters with 52 percent of their support, while Gingrich had to settle for being the “I like you, but not like that” candidate with only 28 percent of women’s backing. Why? One report says that the exit polling suggested that women voters had a “personal distaste” for the twice-cheating, thrice married, alleged open marriage conservative. Gingrich and has campaign staff must have seen that coming, as they brought out Gingrich’s daughters to go on the offensive for their father with the spectrum of cable news shows even before the Florida polls had closed.

On to better luck in Nevada? If the 2008 primary results are any indication, Romney and Ron Paul may have the upper hand there. So if it’s winning that Newt is after in the next contest, he might want to stick with the nickel slots.

Originally posted at iVillage.com, where I’m working as Election 2012 Editor & Contributor.

Image via NewYorker.com

Source: NewYorker.com

If only there was someone who could better express my confusion and shock at this:

Gingrich had to be gleeful when he heard that on the eve of the South Carolina primary election, Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he is dropping out of the 2012 presidential race following his not-so-stellar showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Then there was an extra piece of good news for Gingrich when Perry endorsed Gingrich’s campaign.  Gingrich had to be thinking that that if he does well in the second South Carolina debate, he might close what little gap remains between himself and Mitt Romney, turning the southern state’s primary event into what some are calling a “barn burner!”

All that good news could mean nothing, though, now that Marianne Gingrich – Ex-Mrs. Newt Gingrich Number 2 – has come out with a “tell all” and “explosive” interview with ABC News.  Marianne Gingrich has made no secret of the fact that she’s not sure her ex-husband would make a good president.  She said so in an Esquire Magazine interview a couple of years ago.  The devastating bomb in the interview is this — Marianne Gingrich claims that while she was still married to Newt, he wanted to have an “open marriage.”  Such a quaint term for wanting to be able to stay married but also to sleep around.

As Gingrich’s adult daughters defend their dad and do their best to keep the focus away from his serial infidelities, and calling on people to ignore their ex-stepmother, James Dobson of Focus on the Family is doing the opposite.  He proclaimed this weekend at the Christian Right Summit that conservative voters aren’t ready to see a First Lady in the White House who was a mistress for eight years.  That might not be a campaign breaker in some states, but about 60 percent of Republican voters in South Carolina consider themselves to be evangelical Christians, so many of them are tuned into Dobson’s comments.

So now the GOP presidential race is down to four major candidates – Romney, Gingrich, Rick Santorum – who learned today that he was the real winner in the Iowa Caucuses – and Ron Paul.  I’d say that maybe the very good day really goes to Santorum, who snatched the Iowa win from Romney and now is bound to make hay out of Gingrich’s personal life in hopes of a South Carolina win.

A version of this post was originally written for iVillage.com, where I’ll be working some amazing people on 2012 election coverage!

Image via Boris Rasin via Wikimedia/Creative Commons license

There is just TOO much going on in the world of presidential politics to weigh in on all the pundit-y goodness that could surely fill pages of this site!  But what’s a girl to do when the whole world of Republican politics looks like it’s turning upside down?  I was all set to have a quiet ‘catch up on E-mails’ kind of day when all hell broke loose:

1. Rick Perry is dropping out of the 2012 presidential race,

2. Rick Santorum has now been declared the winner of the Iowa Caucuses after a recount followed the apparent Mitt Romney win by eight votes,

3. ABC News supposedly has a tell-all interview with Mrs. Newt Gingrich number2 in which she will dish on all the reasons Newt isn’t fit to be president (other than the obvious thing about being a serial cheater),

4. Mitt “I’m unemployed just like you” Romney has millions in offshore investments.  And you know why people and corporations make offshore investments — to avoid paying taxes in the U.S.!

5. And some people think it might have been God’s will that Michelle Bachmann came in last in the Iowa caucuses.

Ron Paul must be beside himself with glee.

Now, no one should EVER count their chickens in politics or press their luck until the fat lady really has started singing, but if I were President Obama’s campaign team, I might be thinking about breaking out one of the cheaper bottles of champagne. (Gotta save the good stuff for November!)

I know that’s not really news, but it’s good to have someone do a study about this sort of thing just to remind us that the more things change (there are more women in elective office today than a couple of decades ago), the more things stay the same (the numbers haven’t changed all that much in the last decade).  There are still only 17 women in the Senate and only 17% percent of the seats on the House of Representatives are held by women.

Talk about a glass ceiling.

Yes, I know a few people who are trying to change the dynamic of political conversation.  But female political representation is actually down and fewer women are running for elective office, even though every election cycle these days gets touted as a “year of the woman.”

The just-released report that looks at the state of things for political women is called “Men Rule: The Continued Under-Representation of Women in U.S. Politics,” authored by the same academics who brought us the book,  It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don’t Run for Office.

Here are the seven reasons contained in the report for why men still rule the political world:

1. Women are more likely than men to perceive the electoral environment as highly competitive and biased against female candidates,

2. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s candidacies aggravated women’s perceptions of gender bias in the electoral arena,

3. Women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office,

4. Female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident, and more risk averse than their male counterparts,

5. Women react more negatively than men to many aspects of modern campaigns,

6. Women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office – from anyone, and

7. Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household tasks.

Do any of these surprise you?  I certainly didn’t fall off my chair when I read them.  Now, I’m a big fan of the whole ‘women should rule the world’ idea, but I also recognize the fact that it would be nice to accomplish that without all the name-calling and family-bashing and, let’s just say it, lying that goes on in the world of politics, especially when it’s played out on the big stage.  Who can blame women, or men for that matter, for wanting the steer clear if the mean-spirited vitriol that is political standard operating procedure?

One of the main reasons I quit practicing law was because I was tired of the uncountable number of lawyers (mostly men, I must say) who refused to play nicely and by the rules, and who would try every dirty trick in the book, including personal attacks, to win their cases.  So I can’t imagine making my life worse than it was then to run for office.

Life is just to short for that crap.  And while I am a political junkie and will write about it and analyze the world of political goings-on, I will never run for office because I’d never subject my family to it.  It makes me wonder why men are OK with letting their families suffer.  There are many organizations dedicated to convincing women to step up and run for office.  I admire that and I acknowledge that we won’t be able to create a political environment we want until more women are ready to jump into the fray.  I just don’t see that happening until things are a little more civil in the political world.

My good friend Karen was recently sort of begging people to step up and do something about this.  I certainly hear what she’s saying.   But I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see more women jumping into the political arena in my lifetime.  Unless I live to be about 150, that is.

Image via MSNBC/Meet the Press

This was a big weekend for political junkies. Two, count ‘em, two GOP debates took place back-to-back on the eve of the Republican New Hampshire primary election scheduled this coming Tuesday. After Republican front runner Mitt Romney barely won the Iowa Caucuses by a mere eight votes, observers were confident that Saturday night’s debate would be something of a cage match, providing the non-Romney candidates with the opportunity they’ve been waiting for to pummel the former Massachusetts governor in hopes of gaining more momentum as they head to the South Carolina primary.

Few election watchers doubted that the candidates who are trailing Romney in the polls would come out swinging, aiming to come away with the title of Republican giant slayer. Interestingly, that didn’t happen and Saturday’s debate turned out to be a win by default for Romney, even though Jon Hunstman got the most applause and Rick Santorum got most of the attention with questions about his ideas for overturning the Supreme Court decision that protects anyone’s right to have access to birth control.

As I watched the Twitter stream at #nhdebate, I found I wasn’t the only one wondering when the GOP field — now all white men after Congresswoman Michele Bachmann suspended her campaign after finishing sixth in the Iowa Caucuses — was going to get around to talking about the economy.

Sunday morning brought us round two of the New Hampshire debates and the Republican field made up for its failure to take as many punches as possible at Romney, starting with Newt Gingrich’s comments that Romney was a “timid moderate” who spoke in terms of “pious baloney” compared to the other uber-conservatives on the stage.

It would take way too long to recap everything that happened in the hours of the two New Hampshire debates, but there were some memorable highlights that can only be called, “Debate Moments That Made Us Scratch Our Heads.” Here are five that stood out for me:

1. Ron Paul lauded Martin Luther King, Jr. for being one of his favorite Libertarians. This remark had many debate watchers scratching their heads in light of the fact that Paul has been under attack for what some have called racist comments in newsletters sent out under his name decades ago.

2. Gingrich wants to be a man of the people, but can’t lose the professorial vocabulary. Gingrich would love if we’d forget his Tiffany’s credit line, the Greek cruises and that he’s just as much of a member of the “elite” as many of President Obama’s opponents call him. So it doesn’t help his cause when he attacks others for being “imperious.” That kind of vocabulary is probably handy for “Words with Friends,” but not so much if you want to convince voters you’re a relatable kind of guy.

3. Jon Huntsman showed off his mad Mandarin skills. As a mom by adoption of a daughter from China, I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who can speak Mandarin Chinese. I’ve tried to learn. Trust me, it isn’t easy. But Huntsman, who slipped in a line of Mandarin in one of his debate responses, has been ridiculed by political commentators, calling that moment a bit off key. When responding in English, Huntsman actually got the most applause Saturday night from the New Hampshire crowd (were they saying, “Wo ai ni?”), so I wonder if it isn’t shortsighted to mock the man who is fluent in the language so many of us would like our kids to learn to have an advantage in the 21st century job market.

4. Rick Perry loves the tea party and socialism. Well, he probably only loves the tea party, but it was apparent that one of his debate strategies was to invoke the principles of the tea party movement as much as possible, in hopes of winning the votes that might have gone to Michele Bachmann. And Perry also made sure to say as many sentences as possible that included the words “Obama” and “socialism.” If that’s all he’s got, I’m not sure how much longer he’ll be in this race.

5. Rick Santorum says it’s class warfare to say America has a middle class. I had a hard time figuring out how this argument, while catchy at first, would resonate with most people in New Hampshire. But Santorum chastised Romney for talking about America’s middle class, claiming that such language buys into what he described as President Obama’s efforts to divide and separate the country. Maybe Santorum was focused on class because he was excited about the season premiere of PBS’ Downton Abbey and forgot that he’s also been talking about helping the “middle class” in America.

This post was originally written for iVillage’s 2012 iVote coverage.

Image via Joanne Bamberger/All rights reserved

Last time I checked I thought that using candidates’ children as targets of attack was pretty much off limits, especially after the 2000 presidential campaign when supporters of George W. Bush engaged in “push polling” to suggesting that John McCain’s daughter, Bridget, who was adopted from Bangladesh, was actually an African-American child he had fathered out of wedlock. The candidates themselves pretty much stick the straight and narrow when it comes to leaving young children out of the ugly world of national campaigns. But some Ron Paul supporters apparently didn’t get that memo.

Jon Huntsman’s two youngest daughters — 12-year-old Gracie who was adopted from China and five-year-old Asha, who was born in India — are the inadvertent stars of a new negative ad produced by some group calling themselves “NHLiberty4Paul,” asking in their “Manchurian Candidate” ad, as if its a bad thing, “China Jon’s Daughters: Even Adopted?”

In the 2000 presidential race, McCain tried to ignore the attacks, hoping they’d go away. Huntsman is taking the opposite approach, saying to reporters that he could only comment on how stupid it is to suggest there was something sinister or Manchurian Candidate-like in his family’s decision to adopt.

As a mom by international adoption myself, I am constantly battling what seems to be a common view in our society — that there’s something wrong with your family if you’ve got a child that you didn’t create the old-fashioned way.  But the larger question for me that’s raised by this negative campaign ad, is this — when will our society stop viewing families formed by adoption as something that’s “other.” News reports dealing with families generally don’t make a point of commenting about whether children are biological members of their families. So why do so many people feel the need to point out if adoption was involved? Are they scared? Nervous? Uncomfortable? I think it’s a combination of all those things, but most of all it’s just wrong.

As adults, we can handle it when an inappropriate remark is made about how our families came to be. But our kids can’t. Huntsman is doing a great job making both the press, and whoever this “NHLiberty4Paul” is, back away. But their actions and insinuations are going to linger with Huntman’s daughters — especially his twelve-year-old — forever.

I know because we’ve been there as a family. Obviously no one has ever suggested my husband and I were Communists for adopting our daughter from China. But every comment our daughter ever reads or hears that is in anyway negative, hurtful or insensitive about the fact that she came to us through adoption is like having a rug pulled out from under her sometimes shaky sense of self and where she belongs in this world.

So Ron Paul fans, you need to step off this one.  Attack Huntsman’s policies all you want.  But leave his children out of it.

Image via Wikimedia Commons/(CC) Gage Skidmore

It was really just a matter of time until Michele Bachmann’s presidential race was over.  I had a sense that things were close when her children showed up with her on interviews right before the Iowa Caucuses.  When a candidate starts appearing with their extended family mid-campaign, it’s almost never a good sign.  Remember what happened when we started seeing Hillary Clinton’s mom and daughter Chelsea at election rallies in 2008?

Bachmann finished next to last in the Iowa Republican Caucuses last night.  And even though she said she was going to stay in the race for the South Carolina primary, no one was really surprised on the morning after that she announced she was dropping out.

Iowa-born Bachmann kicked butt in the Iowa Straw Poll last summer, coming in first ahead of all the men candidates.  But that was the high point of her campaign, even though many people thought those conservative “mama grizzlies” left over from Sarah Palin’s heydey would turn out for her.  But when the Congresswoman from Minnesota only ended up with a sixth-place finish and just five percent of the vote, barely ahead of Jon Huntsman who didn’t even campaign in the state, it was clear that her presidential dreams were at an end.

Whether you’re a fan of Bachmann or not, it’s hard to see the last woman in the race go.  One has to wonder whether Bachmann’s withdrawal from the campaign will cause women voters to feel less invested in the 2012 race now that the remaining events and debates will feature only men in suits.

Odds are that Bachmann knew the writing was on the wall for some time – she lost her advisor and political kingmaker Ed Rollins back in September, and then just after Christmas her Iowa Chairman defected for the Ron Paul campaign.  As the woman who created the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, when she didn’t convince Iowa tea partiers that she could win a race against President Obama there really was nowhere for her to go.  And one Iowa mom who caucused says ultimately Bachmann contributed to her own undoing because she was reluctant to take questions at campaign events and had little to say on the agricultural issues important to so many Iowans.

Bachmann spent most of her farewell speech waxing lyrical about the Founding Fathers, but she made sure to get in some jabs against President Obama and what she called his “socialist” ideas, saying that she would continue working to help repeal the Affordable Care Act, which she proclaimed had been the impetus for her to run for president.

So what’s next for the “Iron Lady” with the “titanium spine?”  Has anyone noticed she’s been going after the other Republican candidates except for Mitt Romney?  Don’t be surprised if you see her step up some lobbying efforts for some Romney/Bachmann 2012 bumper stickers.

A version of this was originally posted at iVillage, where I’ll be heading up their 2012 election coverage.

Image via Wikimedia Commons/(CC) Gage Skidmore

Who really won in Iowa last night?  Sure, Mitt Romney was declared the official winner of the Republican Iowa Caucus.  But I have the feeling that Rick Santorum is doing a political happy dance right about now, after basically producing a tie with the so-called Republican frontrunner.

Voters endured weeks of spinning and speculation by political observers about how former Massachusetts Governor Romney would undoubtedly win there, even though other candidates, like Ron Paul and Santorum, were closing in on his lead.

Except the Iowa Caucuses didn’t play out the way most observers had predicted.  This Republican campaign season, almost every candidate has had a moment in the spotlight.  Good timing and the interest in him by the same conservative religious voters who gave former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee the win in Iowa four years ago allowed Santorum to surge ahead and almost steal the win from Romney.

Romney eked out a mere eight vote victory over Santorum, but that’s hardly good news for the candidate who spent millions of his own campaign money to convince Iowans he’s their man.  Plus he had the backing of millions more in Super-PAC money that supported a variety of attack ads against the other Republican candidates, especially Newt Gingrich.

So what did Romney do wrong and what did Santorum do right?  That one is simple – Romney made few appearances in Iowa in the lead up to the caucuses compared to Santorum and others.  Most of the other GOP candidates touted that they were going to make appearances in as many of Iowa’s 99 counties as they possibly could.  Old-fashioned politicking, hand-shaking, and meeting and greeting did the trick for Santorum, who made appearances at 370 town hall meetings.

Or maybe it was the sweater vest. Or the pick-up truck.

But seriously, with that kind of time in the state, his super-conservative credentials and the ability to connect one-on-one with voters, similar to candidate Barack Obama in 2008 according to one reporter, it’s not all that surprising that Santorum was able to come out with a virtual tie in Iowa with Romney. But can he keep that up?

Santorum makes no secret of the fact that he is very conservative on certain social issues, so that could create problems for his campaign’s sustainability has he goes forward. While he recently told the TODAY Show he wouldn’t outlaw contraception, he has also said states should be allowed to ban birth control.  That’s a position that won’t be a popular one with most voters and could hurt him with more moderate Americans, even if they like his stand on the economy.

So many Republicans are surely asking themselves today — is Rick Santorum electable in a race against President Obama?  Yes, he was a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, a state that’s been going more red than blue in the last decade, but he lost his last Senate race in 2006 by almost 20 points to his Democratic challenger.  New Hampshire is the next primary race, and current polling shows him fourth with single digit numbers similar.  But, as Iowa voters proved last night, in the world of presidential politics these days, anything is possible.

A version of this was originally posted at iVillage, where I’ll be heading up the site’s 2012 election coverage along with Kelly Wallace.  We’ll be weighing in on all the issues you want to hear about!

UPDATE: For a true “insider’s” take on what happened in Iowa and what you should understand about the first primary in the country, hop on over to The Broad Side to hear what “@IowaCaucusMom” had to say!