Rosen was forced to apologize, but she really shouldn’t have. Being a mom (stay-at-home or not) is hard work for most people, but the parts of it that are hard work, figuring out how to feed, clothe, and shelter your kids, how to educate them, how to keep them safe in a dangerous world, are things that don’t exist when you’ve got $250 million in the bank. When you’ve got that kind of cheddar, even the chores associated with parenting (stay-at-home or not) cease to count as work. If you’ve got a quarter-billion in the bank and you’re still doing your own laundry, that’s a hobby.

But absent the pressures of everyday life for the average American parent, the actual raising of children, being there for them, loving them, whether it’s full-time stay-at-home style or struggling to fit it in with a job, isn’t work. It’s a privilege, and I think most Americans (excepting the entrenched culture warriors who would vote for any Republican with a pulse), when faced with the offensive notion that Ann Romney’s struggles as a multi-hundred-millionaire mom somehow mirrors their own, will be more put-off than sympathetic.

That’s why the President and his team’s handling of this has been so wrong-headed. President Obama cast Rosen’s remarks as an attack on Ann Romney, but it wasn’t. It was an attack on Mitt Romney for fixing his entire policy focus on women around whatever he and his ultra-privileged wife banter about while they’re trotting around on dressage horses.