What ... no black domestics?

Plunderbund--a delightfully named site devoted to Ohio politics--takes note of what a tremendous help Gov. John Kasich was yesterday at a rally for Mitt Romney, who, remarkably, is regarded unfavorably by a majority of Ohioan women:

Kasich talks about his ("hot") wife, and the wives of Romney and Ryan, and the reasons they couldn’t be at the event today:

"They’re at home doing the laundry" and "at home taking care of the kids."

Nice touch, John, who, it would seem, was brought on stage only to prove that the party's morons aren't limited to the party's presidential ticket.

This morning E.J. Dionne wrote, in part, about the right's " '50s nostalgia tak[ing] the form of a quest for order, social homogeneity, religious faith ... and strong families, sometimes defined as a return to old gender roles...." That nostalgia, like all nostalgia, is organically rooted in a mythical revisionism; in reality, not only the 1950s intelligentsia (who were among the finest ever: e.g. Dwight MacDonald, C. Wright Mills, Richard Hofstadter) but quite average American families found this nation's imposed cultural uniformity to be spiritually crushing--the simplest, most straightforward evidence of this assertion was the broad welcome extended to John Kennedy's challenging "New Frontier."

Nonetheless, demonstrating that the contemporary GOP really is just the party of cranky white guys, GOP pols persist in hustling the myth. They think it's "cute"; they are congenitally oblivious to how oppressively smothering it must sound to virtually everyone except incurably cranky white guys.

Comments

[AnneJ]

Just remember, republican men that the attitudes of the fifties may very well have been the reason for everything that went on in the sixties.

[dr.e]

@AnneJ: Amen. I was there. Unfortunately it's going to take another generation to change things, but then that's what we thought in the 60's. They're not going away.

[Robert Lipscomb]

I miss Tammy Faye and Jim Baker.

[dr.e]

And I miss Clara Bell and Howdy Doody, (Not to mention Stan, Ollie, et. al.) who seem to be trying to make a comeback.

[Peter G]

You must be somewhat older than I dr.e for I miss Eddie Munster. Fortunately I have his hairline reincarnated somehow in Paul Ryan.

[japa21]

I miss The Donna Reed Show, which is what the GOP really longs for, a subservient wife who does all her housework in a dress and always has everything proper at home for her hardworking husband.

In one of my previous lives as a relationship counserlor I created what I called the Donna Reed Syndrome, bascially where men felt that was the way their wives should be, or women who considered themselves failures because they couldn't be a "good" a wife as Doona was.