Ann Romney "At Home" with $20 Million a Year

It doesn't matter whether Ann Romney stayed at home to raise her five sons. Nobody cares.

What matters is that she stayed at home to be a full-time mom with millions of dollars of annual income.  Maybe when her sons were young the family income was lots less than the $20 million annually of recent years. Maybe it was only 10%, only $2 million a year.

That's still an awful lot of money.

I raised five sons and a daughter. Sometimes I was a full-time stay-at-home mom; sometimes I was a  married working mom; and sometimes I was a single parent working mom. In any of these situations I sure would have been glad to have millions of dollars in annual income.

Think how different being a mom is when you've got bushels of money! You can hire household help  - lots of it. Someone else can cook, clean up the kitchen, do the laundry, fold the clothes, do the marketing, pick up the kids, wash the dog (when he's not on the roof of the car). Someone else can go to the dry cleaners, sweep the porch, call the plumber, make the beds, pick up after the kids, pick up after the kids, pick up after the kids. Someone else can bake the birthday cakes, wrap the presents, address the holiday cards, take your various Cadillacs to be serviced, schedule the pediatrician appointments and  the dentist appointments and the barber shop appointments. Someone else can take the kids to get shoes and school clothes. Someone else can make sure teeth are brushed and ears are clean.

You get the picture.

Most of all, you don't have to worry about money. You don't have to think about it at all. There's no budgeting issues, no waiting for the next paycheck to get the kids those shoes. No dismay as the kids' dental bills pile up on your credit card or winter heating oil doubles in cost. There's no stricken sense of calamity approaching when one of your Cadillacs starts making a funny noise. There's no sorrow to endure because you have to tell a kid he can't go on a school field trip because of the expense. Or can't play on the soccer team because you can't afford the equipment.

There's no agony about wanting to sit next to a sick child in a hospital but not having the money to hire a sitter for the kids at home.

Money doesn't buy happiness but it sure can provide you a cushion against the anti-happy aspects of most people's lives.

What money buys is insulation.

Ann Romney has indeed been insulated. There is no way, with millions a year in income, that she can have the slightest idea of any normal mom's life. She knows nothing of being a stay at home mom except the percs: no nasty boss, no juggling work and home, no terror of leaving infants all day with sitters, no raggedy loss of sleep because of days that start at 5 a.m. and end near midnight.

She got the perks of staying home and paid little of the price. With her millions she could avoid all the mess and work of baking cakes and just enjoy the birthday boy blowing out the candles. She never had to suffer the loss of income of a stay at home mom. Nor did she have to endure (let's face it) the boredom and loneliness of being home alone all day with small people who are less than stellar conversationalists. If the home drill got a bit tedious, she could boogie on down to her "girls club" for companionship or jump a plane for a week of fun somewhere.

Hers was not the stay at home life of 99.9% of those moms who do stay at home. If ahe chose to do some of the scut work of mommying, she could so choose. But, unlike the rest of us, she had a CHOICE. We had no choice about who cleaned up the vomit when a kid was stricken with flu at 3 a.m.

Mitt Romney boasts that he relies on his wife for information about women and their concerns. If this be true, he's a very stupid businessman. What chief executive would use a consultant who knows NOTHING about the topic, i.e. nothing about the lives of women other than the lives of very rich women?

Because Romney and his missus are so insulated by their vast income, they don't even know that they don't know! This accounts for his "tone deaf" remarks that underscore his wealth, like relating to NASCAR on the basis of being chums with owners of NASCAR teams. Romney isn't just "tone deaf". He's deaf, blind, and so wrapped in wealth he might as well be from Mars. And if he's from Mars, Ann is from Venus, an even further planet. Neither has a clue about lives of people outside a $20 million a year bubble.

This is probably what that clumsy nobody, Hilary Rosen, meant to say. Let's hope so. But it's hard to give the benefit of the doubt to a woman who so ineptly creates a distraction just when Obama had accrued a 20% advantage with women voters. In its thirst for controversy, the media bent over backward NOT to tell the public that Hilary Rosen has absolutely no role in the White House and none in the Obama campaign. Her sole role is getting herself on TV. Given the politically stupid nature of her attack on Ann Romney, it's pretty obvious why no one at the White House or the election campaign gave her a job. With a Democratic friend like Hilary Rosen, who needs an enemy?

Better yet, to paraphrase that famous political film, "Bambi":  "If you can't say something well, don't say anything at all."

Will Rosen's remark change any votes? No. And that points out another instance of how out of touch with women Romney, his missus and his fellow GOPers are. They think we women are a bunch of dumb bunnies who will abandon a candidate who is solidly on our side because some woman we never heard of said something about Romney's wife.

WE WOMEN ARE NOT STUPID (except for Hilary Rosen).

We do not think as we are told to think. We older ones had a lifetime of men telling us what to think and what to do. "We have been down on the floor!" The younger among us can't even imagine such goings on and certainly want nothing to do with such a program. SO SHUT UP, ROMNEY, AND YOU GUYS AT THE AUGUSTA GOLF COURSE!

And shut your wives up too, the last women in America who do what their husbands tell them to do. We don't want mouthpiece Ann Romney telling us about the hard work of being a stay at home mom when she did not have to do one lick of the work of being a stay at home mom.

So just shut up, Ann Romney, and go to your roots-bleaching appointment like a good girl and leave us real women alone.