Renee Ellmers: "Could You Dumb It Down For Me?"

Renee Ellmers got quoted saying stupid things about women, and her office lashed back that "a liberal woman reporter" had taken her comments out of context. The comments in question?

“Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level. You know, one of the things that has always been one of my frustrations and I speak about this all the time – many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and, you know, how the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that.

“But by starting off that discussion that way, we’ve already turned people away. Because it’s like ‘that doesn’t affect my life, I don’t understand how that affects my life.’ ”

From there, Ellmers said Republicans need to be “engaging individuals on their level,” adding that GOP men should “bring it down to a woman’s level.”

The reputed "liberal woman reporter" was Ashe Schow, writing in the conservative Washington Examiner. Schow has worked for Heritage Action, the 501(c)(4) arm of the Heritage Foundation, which scarcely qualifies her as a "liberal" anything. According to her "faculty bio" at the Leadership Institute, she "has a background in drafting political donation messaging for conservative-leaning PACs."

Ellmers

You can read for yourself Schow's original article. Rather than taking Ellmers out of context, she got the context exactly right. Ellmers, along with other Congressional Republican women, were explaining how conservative women were going to disprove the Democratic charge that the Republican Party has been conducting a "war on women."

We've got to improve our "messaging," the conservative Congresswomen said, and then they let Ellmers speak into that microphone, which only proved that their messaging still needs work and that Renee Ellmers, in particular, is not ready for prime time.