The Obama campaign has three high-profile spokespeople who regularly tweet. David Axelrod, Stephanie Cutter and Ben LaBolt.
No one gets the kind of right-wing hate that Stephanie Cutter does, and it comes from men and women. Women tend to be snarky and mean, picking at what she wears or how she looks. Men, on the other hand, are downright disgusting and sexist, saying things like the tweets I collected from a five-minute twitter search today.
Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald noticed, too.
Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, has referred to Cutter with the brash mix of sexism and unrequited lust that only he can administer, alternately referring to her as “Obama’s chief campaign babe” or the “chief spokesbabe for Obama-Biden.” He’s also insulted her intelligence and suggested she’s just a pretty face for the campaign. “Stephanie Cutter is a puppet. The words in her mouth have been put there by Obama,” he said in July. More recently, his opinion of her seems to have soured: “The clueless and blind, lying hack, Stephanie Cutter. I don’t know how smart she is. I really don’t.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, mysteriously told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in August, “I would say, this woman has a lot to hide.” “She’s a shameless lying liar,” conservative blogger Michelle Malkin told Hannity a few weeks later. Indeed, Hannity seems to have targeted Cutter with a vengeance. He ran a full taped profile segment on the aide, whom he called “the one person that can be credited for driving the hateful tone that has been spewing from team Obama.” “Willing to say anything to get her candidate elected, Cutter has waged a campaign of lies and slander … using the same tactics for nearly a decade,” Hannity explained. In another segment, he said she had a “difficult and surly personality.”
On CNN today, Cutter patiently explained to Wolf Blitzer why Libya was not a foreign policy failure, but the right was having none of it. Reactions on Twitter ranged from mockery to vicious claims of treason, even.
Why? Here's my theory: Stephanie Cutter is a strong, confident, clear-spoken woman. She is not only attractive, but she's smart and unafraid to say what needs to be said.
Also, she's a woman. And the right wing treats women like...well, Rush Limbaugh teaches them to do. Just like they treat Latinos or black folks, women are simply an object to ridicule or reduce to a sex object.
It must have something to do with their tiny little brains, which seem only to respond at the most basic level of comprehension, and then only at the level of prehistoric man. Not that I'm calling them Neanderthals or anything, you understand, but I must admit their reactions are a strong representation of how I imagine Neanderthal man to behave.
PS. Happy birthday, Steph Cutter. Sorry you had to spend it at a debate.
