Our gaffe-prone vice president is going to have his work cut out for him on Thursday night, when he’ll be debating against the formidable budgetary and economic expertise of Republican running mate Paul Ryan. Which is probably why, according to Nancy Pelosi, it’s best that Biden maybe just try to steer the conversation clear of all of that pesky economic bad news and just keep the focus Everbody’s Favorite Democratic Distraction — the war on women, of course.

I’m very confident that Joe Biden will do a great job. … I just would say one word to the Biden people: Women. Women. Whether you are talking about affordable health care, whether you are talking about Medicare, whether you are talking about Lilly Ledbetter, fair, equal pay, you know, ending discrimination in the workplace, the rest of it. I really think that the divide among single women for the president is like, 25 – 30 points, and we have to have married women in that category as well. … [Biden] was the author of the Violence Against Women Act, which Paul Ryan has voted against…

Yes, because when I think about the critical issues facing this country, I for one know that my simple, egocentric female brain sure as heck skips right over “jobs and the economy” and shoots right to “ending discrimination in the workplace.” [Head meets desk.]

After the clarifications afforded by the first Romney vs. Obama debate, the Democrats’ campaign — so much of which is based on trumped-up social distractions like Nancy Pelosi’s brilliant ‘advice’ — immediately took a hit, even among us women:

Further, Romney’s post-debate surge appears to have all but wiped out Obama’s once double-digit lead among women voters.

A Pew Research Center survey released Monday depicted a remarkable swing in the numbers, with Romney pulling even among women in polling late last week. In September, the same polling outfit showed Obama leading by 18 points among women.

This entire stupid meme rests on the assumption that women first and foremost self-identify as women, and that we vote as a big monolithic voting bloc; that may be how Democrats want us to see ourselves, but as Kathleen Parker points out, it’s a far cry from the truth.

This also happens to be the year of the fiscal cliff, when automatic spending cuts take effect at the same time Bush-era tax breaks expire. … It is also the year that al-Qaeda caught its breath and began gaining traction again, and when terrorists murdered one of our ambassadors. …

Women, in other words, recognize the gravity of the problems this nation faces and are likely to pick a candidate based on these issues rather than on a party’s platform on abortion and contraception.

In fact, women, who are not a monolithic group any more than men are, don’t really rank reproductive issues at the top of their concerns. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that fewer than 1 percent of respondents mentioned women’s health or birth control as top election-year issues. …