This is the most absurd take I’ve heard on Romney’s comment about ‘binders full of women’ the other night in the debate. And it comes from Jessica Yellin, who is supposed to be a reputable reporter at CNN. Bear in mind this is all Romney originally said:
And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can you help us find folks? And I brought us whole binders full of — of women. I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my cabinet and my senior staff that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.
I hear that, you hear that and we think OK, sounds reasonable. But the left is SO DESPERATE that they’ve turned it into this (h/t: Jeff Poor at the Daily Caller):
“Look, Anderson, it was very unfortunate for Gov. Romney, because it sort of raises this question: Can he relate to working women?” Yellin said. “You know, it made it sound almost like working women are some mail-order product you can order out of colored binders. … And the problem for Gov. Romney is two-fold. One, if he’s trying to show, and he is, that he can relate to and understand the frustrations working women go through, this does not suggest that he understands the sense of ‘outsiderness’ many women feel when they work in largely male environments.”
“And, two, it raises a question, this is a man who, at the time he became governor, had been a top executive in the business world for multiple decades, and didn’t he already know qualified women that he could call upon?” Yellin said. “Why did he need to go outside and get a binder full of women to find some? Now, as Jim [Acosta] just pointed out, he actually did know women, and he had some on his staff, so he did himself a disservice with the way he phrased this, Anderson. But the Obama team is getting mileage out of it.”
My head wants to explode at the amount of stupid in this comment. Seriously, all he wanted to do was hire women and that’s what he did! That’s it. And it was women from the group MASSGAP that actually put the binders together.
Mark Levin responds to this ludicrous controversy this way:
Folks, I was an Associate Director of Presidential Personnel for a little over a year in the Reagan administration. We would gather resumes of individuals interested in non-career positions throughout the administration, computerize the information, and make the names available throughout the government. We also solicited resumes from prominent individuals who we wanted to recruit for positions in the administration and process them as well.
Most often, when President Reagan wanted to fill a senior administration position, including cabinet and sub-cabinet positions, top agency posts, and judicial positions, we would put together a binder filled with qualified candidates, as well as recommendations, from which the president would select a candidate.
So, I have a question: how, exactly, did and does Obama decide who to appoint to over 3,000 non-career positions in his administration, including his senior positions? How does his Office of Presidential Personnel recruit candidates? How does it process and collate resumes and present options to the president for selecting candidates for top posts? And if President Obama is not presented with a binder of qualified candidates, exactly how does he make his decisions?
It’s a common practice to collect binders full of resumes. This is so a nontroversy.
But hey, the bright side is that this is all the left has on Romney. So much for an October surprise.