Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" are exploding with outrage and ridicule all over the internet.
While dodging a question on equal pay for women at Tuesday night's second presidential debate, Romney extolled his efforts as governor of Massachusetts to go out of his way to find qualified women for his cabinet (the governmental body, not the storage shelf for binders).
"I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men," Romney explained. "So I went to my staff and I said, 'How come all the people for these jobs are all men?'
"'They said well these are the people who have the qualifications,' and I said, 'Well, gosh, can't we find some women that are also qualified?' And so 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 they brought us whole binders full of women."
Within a minute of Romney's comment, bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com was created by Veronica de Souza, a 23-year-old social media marketer and Hofstra alum who had been laid off that very day.
"I just went to make a new blog, saw that it was free, and I was like, all right. I'm going to take this. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'm going to take it," de Souza told National Public Radio.
She photoshopped a picture of an old Trapper Keeper binder with the phrase "TRAP HER KEEP HER" and posted it. Before the debate had ended, more than 3,000 people were following her new blog. By the next day it was 11,000, and she had nearly 2,000 submissions of pictures of binders and women.
Like Big Bird, the buzzword from the first presidential debate, Romney's binder comment gave easy shorthand to a discomfort some voters have with Romney or his policies.
While the president was able to clearly explain his support for equal pay for women, Romney was circumspect, refusing to say whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a bill which would guarantee equal pay for women, which Republicans shot down in 2007. In addition, several women's groups that worked with the Romney administration on the push for female candidates stated that they initiated the search, not Romney.
The whole situation plays into the storyline of Romney as awkward and aloof, caught in a 1950s mindset where qualified women must be tracked down by a committee.
And as with Big Bird, this controversy will fade, though it remains to be seen how much damage it might do to Romney's support among women before it does.
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