Only SNL or the Daily Show would be mean enough to
parody a nice farm girl, first in her family to attend college, who worked at a
fruit stand and McDonald’s in her teens but has been, like fellow Congressman
Paul Ryan, only on the government payroll since graduating.
Her constituents, as Timothy Egan points out in the New York Times, had an “unemployment
rate 30 percent above the national average last year. One in six people live
below the poverty level. One in five is on food stamps. And the leading
employer is government, providing 3,023 of the 9,580 nonfarm payroll jobs last
year.”
Yet in Rep. Rodgers’ cozy view, government is the
enemy, as she opposes Obamacare, raising the minimum wage and extending jobless
benefits in a Republican “year of real action--by empowering people--not making
their lives harder.”
How? The Matron of the Year sayeth not, but
statistics show her constituents signing up for that dreaded health coverage at
a brisk rate in a state that, before her emergence, had raised the minimum wage
to the highest in the country at $9.32 an hour (close to the $10.10 Democrats
are seeking nationally) and has since shown job growth above the national
average.
But with her wholesome good looks and soporific
manner, this year’s GOP Matron of the Year has no rough edges like Sarah Palin,
who is still taking cheap shots at Bush I’s token woman Peggy Noonan for being
too slow to join Tea Party loudmouths in calling this week’s SOTU "a
spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation."
If Republicans want to perfect their robotic Matron
of the Year and keep raising tons of money before the next election cycle, they
will have to persuade Palin to stand behind a poster of Rodgers and confine
herself to her successor’s smiling platitudes.
Or go back to the GOP lab for attitude retooling.
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