Dear Mitt,

Dear Mitt,

I was just lying in bed in the dark thinking about the gifts President Obama promised me to win my vote. According to your "private" statements, I must have been duped and bribed to have voted for him. I also wonder how you can be so naive as to think you have any privacy at all after the 47% debacle.

Let's see, he promised me a road to citizenship. Thanks, but I was born in Brooklyn, NY and proud of it. Oh, I know, college loan forgiveness. I didn't have any personally, but I did write checks to Idaho State and the government for ten years to pay off my spouse's loans. Free contraceptives, that's what I'm getting! Wait, I'm sixty years old and past childbearing. Besides, I can afford a box of Trojans, should the need ever arise. I'm sorry, I am just going to have to dig a little deeper to find those gifts.

Could it be the promise that sometime soon I will be able to purchase affordable health insurance? Could it be the assurance that my daughters and nieces, and everybody else's daughters and nieces will have access to reproductive health services? Yeah, Mitt, that was a big one. That one was enormous. Speaking as a woman who was able to limit her family to two very much wanted children, this was important to me. I like President Obama. I like his wife and I like the way he treats his mother-in-law and daughters.

You seem not to know why you lost the white woman vote. You were not honest with yourself or anyone else. Instead of proudly owning up to the creation of the Massachusetts  Health Insurance program, you distanced yourself. Every time you could have made yourself appealing to the common man or woman, you aligned yourself with the radical right. You courted the millionaires and billionaires. You showed no understanding of what it takes to get by these days, none. I didn't see how you were going to make America a better place. Going back to the policies that President Obama inherited just didn't fill me with hope.

Right now your party is bemoaning the fact that rich white men are not in power. That it isn't the same America. Don't worry; rich white men are pulling the strings, and becoming even more obstreperous in Congress even as I write. This is the same America, believe me. The difference is that women of all ages, youth, minorities, real people of faith, and thinking white men have said no. No more free ride, pay your share. One man, one vote and they all count the same. Yup, not even Karl Rove gets two legal votes.

Take some advice from the grand dame of your party, Barbara Bush. She wants you to get over it and move on. So do I.

Sincerely,
Carol