“It’s a ridiculous argument. Ridiculous. It’s been largely debunked this week by the people who have looked at it,” said Geithner. “It’s a ridiculous way to look at the problem. And this is a political moment and you’re going to be seeing — just to borrow a line from Mario Cuomo — ‘you’re going to see a lot of politicians choose to campaign in fiction. But we have to govern in fact.’”

Geithner was responding to recent allegations by Romney that the Obama administration had waged a “war” on women. Romney said earlier this week that the “real war on women has been waged by the policies of the Obama administration…did you know that of all the jobs lost during the Obama years, 92.3 percent of them are women. During the Obama years, women have suffered.”

I asked Geithner about the technical accuracy of the Romney claim and he explained “this crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody. And it began in, as you know, in early 2008. And a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men, because they affected construction and manufacturing. And as the crisis spread and state and local governments were forced to cut back on services and fire a lot of teachers, that caused a lot of damage to women, too.”