The comment should have been treated as off-point rather than conflated as some absurd attack on the stay-at-home mom. Instead, even some who pretend to a higher moral plane brought the debate to its lowest level, namely the Catholic League, which surely spoke for no one when it tweeted: “Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.”

What sweeties.

Only gravel doesn’t know that the women’s vote is all-important this election season. Never mind the perennial insult that women are monolithic and vote only as their female parts dictate. Women, as Ann Romney has tried to point out, care about jobs and the economy because they are sentient human beings who do, in fact, work (57.7 percent of those over 16), or want to. And they do, in fact, worry that there will be no recognizable nation left if we don’t get serious about the debt and deficit in ways that don’t split the country into warring factions of haves and have-nots. Nothing like using women to emotionalize and distract from the hard work of governance.