Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 To reenforce what my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote at Double X it's worth emphasizing that jokes about "binders full of women" aside, Mitt Romney's answer on women's pay equity last night was pretty amazingly retrograde. The basic issue is that Romney doesn't believe in pay equity regulation for the general reason that he's skeptical of business regulation as a whole. He thinks America will be a richer society over the long run if business owners and managers are free to run their companies as they see fit. What Romney would like to say is that this view of his stems from a generally libertarian approach to economic policy and doesn't reflect any kind of special hostility to women or women's economic opportunity. That's why he goes on about the semi-accurate fact that as governor of Massachusetts he made a special effort to recruit women into high office. 
 
 The problem is that when he discusses the things that—unlike pay equity legislation—he does think will help women, it turns out that he really does have a retrograde view of women's role in the economy: 
 
 Now, one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort, but number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you. 
 
 We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women. In the — in the last four years, women have lost 580,000 jobs. That’s the net of what’s happened in the last four years. We’re still down 580,000 jobs. I mentioned 3 1/2 million women more now in poverty than four years ago. 
 
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 What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a — a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that — that they would otherwise not be able to — to afford. 
 
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 I am favorably disposed toward both full employment and flexible workplace scheduling. But what Romney is saying here is that due to their family responsibilities women are burdened with an inherent disadvantage in the labor market. In conditions of full employment, firms do become desperate for workers and are willing to do things they won't do in weak labor market. High-margin businesses, for example, hand out raises to competent experienced workers. And firms of all kinds take risks on people they wouldn't otherwise go for—those who lack formal credentials, those who might have had legal problems in the past, smart people who seem to lack experience, and so forth. Romney's suggestion is that a woman—at least a woman with a family—is basically like a high school dropout with a felony conviction in his background. A marginally employable worker who'll get a job if and only if the labor market is super-tight. After all, everyone knows mom needs to be home at 5:00 to start cooking dinner. 
 
 But maybe dad should cook dinner! 
 
 After all, not every job can be flexible. When I was little my mother worked in the art department for Newsweek and it simply wouldn't have been possible for someone to perform that job without working very long hours a couple of days a week. Since you want your newsweekly to be reasonably timely, a huge share of the final proofing and layout decisions have to be made as close to the shipping day as possible. That means you work incredibly long hours on the closing days, and compensating time off at other points in the week. If you're a parent in a job like that, someone else has to take care of your kids when you're closing the issue. As it happens, my dad wasn't much of a cook at that point in his life and my recollection is that we would usually order pizza. But one way or another, it was quality family time and cherished childhood memories for me as well as a totally indispensible offloading of childcare responsibilities that were simply incompatible with my mom's job. 
 
 It's true, of course, that in a full employment economy someone or other would have hired mom for a job that let her be home at 5:00 every day. But not all jobs can be like that. The appropriately flexible positions might have been worse matches for her skills, depressing her earnings power. Or maybe she just really liked worked in the art department at a newsweekly. ||||| Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Sunday blasted Mitt Romney for saying on the campaign trail that majority of jobs lost under the Obama administration are among women, calling the Republican presidential candidate’s argument a “ridiculous way” of looking at the country’s economic challenges. 
 
 “It’s a ridiculous way to look at the problem. It’s a political moment. You’re going to see a a lot of politicians choose to campaign in fiction, but we have to campaign in fact,” Geithner said on ABC’s “This Week.” “This crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody, and it began in early 2008 and a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men because they affected construction and manufacturing.” 
 
 Pressed by host George Stephanopoulos on whether the Romney’s argument that 92.3 percent of jobs lost under President Barack Obama have been among females, Geithner said, “It’s a ridiculous argument. It’s been largely debunked this week by people who have looked at it.” 
 
 Read more about: President Barack Obama, Economy, Mitt Romney, Women, Jobs, Timothy Geithner ||||| By Justin K. Aller/Getty Images. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on May 4 in Pittsburgh. 
 
 Mitt Romney has been running a vast focus group for months. He says that almost every day during his campaign he has secretly sat down with three or four families who are being hurt by Obama’s economy to learn what their lives are like. He's been on the road for a long time, which means he must have met hundreds of families. Since the whole business happens on the QT, you can imagine the candidate suddenly appearing from behind the detergent display at the all-night Target to get the views of the startled Anderson family. 
 
 
 
 That Romney was having so many secret meetings was a surprise to nearly everyone who has covered him. Where does he find the time? But more puzzling is that he seems to show so little return for his investment. When Romney was trying to show that he was in touch with the economic concerns of women voters, he referred to his wife. “My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me,” Romney told newspaper editors, “and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy.” Given that he's held so many meetings with families, you'd think his pockets would be laden with ready anecdotes. We all know what Bill Clinton would do. (And we'd still be listening well past dinnertime.) 
 
 
 
 Romney is trying to connect with the middle class to show that he gets it. The rap is that he doesn't know what regular people are going through, so there's no way he can understand how his policies would change their lives. To combat this, Romney started last Friday to open his campaign speeches with rapid-fire anecdotes about his interactions with those who are in financial straits. At a Cleveland town hall Monday, he told the story of five different voters in short order—the barber, the small-business owner whose employee slept in her house, the couple who took out a loan to have a second child, the couple with the duplexes who lost their value, and the woman he met on the rope line in Norfolk. "It touches your heart," he said. "I know a lot of people are struggling. I am doing my best to help them." Later, at a fundraiser he told the story of a veterinarian who was losing business. “I guess even the animals are suffering in the Obama economy.” 
 
 
 
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 The gambit behind these stories is obvious enough: to show Gov. Romney cares. On Saturday, President Obama said that Romney learned the wrong lessons from his years in business. Obama used an anecdote about Romney's off-key response to a woman distressed over her economic condition as proof. These stories Romney is now telling are anecdotal antidotes to that charge. 
 
 By keeping the regular people from the media, Romney can tell their stories on his own terms. You can't blame him. Public roundtables devolve into spectacles where the candidate has to empathize for the camera or be labeled a brute or out of touch. The face-twisting and lip-biting required are embarrassing for everyone. Under the public-empathy spotlight, Obama had to pretend a woman was going to get her government job back, which he knew was unlikely. Plus, any civilian who talks to a candidate gets the full treatment by the press or the opposing political party. Why subject a private citizen to that? 
 
 
 
 What the governor should be more candid about, though, is what he learns from these sojourns into the middle class. Do these meetings reaffirm his pre-existing views about the economy or does he learn something new? Is he challenged at all? When Barack Obama ran for president, he made a showy trip to Iraq. He wore swish sunglasses and sat next to Gen. Petraeus on helicopter flights. At the end of his trip, he told us almost nothing of what he'd learned. He explored none of the complexities of what he saw on the ground, and he offered us no insight into how his pre-existing ideas changed and shifted once he saw things firsthand. This was extraordinary because we knew—and have come to know even more since then—that Barack Obama has lots of thoughts about things. (Don't even get him started on "The Waste Land.") 
 
 Romney could surely give us some insight, given how much time he has spent with the hard-pressed. This isn't just about showing empathy. Romney is running as a person whose business career is supposed to make him wise about how to jumpstart a weak economy. We've never had a president from the world of finance. People are suspicious about how that experience might affect their lives. Even the last president from the business world, George W. Bush, had a skeptical view of financiers from his days in Midland, Texas: "They'll buy you or sell you, depending upon if it's in their interest." 
 
 The political and governing challenge for Mitt Romney is how he adapts his businessman's worldview to the real world he faces. He's no longer shrinking payrolls to meet the bottom line. He has to think about the people who are being crunched by his decisions. Sometimes he'll have to ignore the pain that some will suffer for the larger good. That is what presidents do. It's why they deserve a vacation now and again. The job is hard. And sometimes he'll have to know when to tweak something or change his priorities to help people who are really hurting. ||||| Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning, Rep. Michele Bachmann said she is “seriously looking into” endorsing presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The remarks are the closest the former GOP presidential candidate and Minnesota congresswoman has come to making an endorsement since dropping out of the race on Jan. 4. 
 
 Citing the decision by Romney’s chief rival – former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum – to suspend his campaign last Tuesday, Bachmann said there is a “uniting and pulling together around our eventual nominee.” 
 
 “I have said that I want my voice to be one of uniting our party, the independents, the main stream, the conservatives, evangelicals, the tea party movement,” Bachmann continued, adding, “I’m waiting for our party to come together and help in that process.” 
 
 Bachmann’s ecumenical view was not as pronounced during her own run for the GOP nomination, which was marked by frequent shots at Romney over the health care program he launched in Massachusetts in 2006. 
 
 Sunday morning, jousting with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Bachmann called Romney “smart” on job creation. 
 
 “Mitt Romney also understands how to turn around companies," she said. "The United States government needs to have a turnaround person who knows how to be successful." 
 
 Underlying the back-and-forth was the controversy that stoked hours of cable news coverage this week, when a Democratic strategist suggested that Romney’s wife, Ann, was unqualified to advise her husband on the economic struggles facing women because she had “never worked a day in her life.” 
 
 Bachmann called the remarks by the strategist, Hilary Rosen, “shocking and insulting.” 
 
 “When 92-percent of the people under Barack Obama’s failed economic policies are women who’ve lost jobs, that’s an unbelievably shocking number,” Bachmann added, reviving a statistic Romney himself used last week, which prompted a slew of fact check pieces. 
 
 (The statistic also came under fire minutes earlier on the broadcast, during an interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who called it “ridiculous and deeply misleading.”) 
 
 Facts, figures, and controversies aside, the exchange this morning seemed to underscore the degree to which both Republicans and Democrats view women’s votes as crucial in the upcoming general election. 
 
 “This election is not going to be about Ann Romney or Hillary’s remarks,” Gillibrand said. “What this election is going to be about is which candidate fights for America’s women.” 
 
 Bachmann didn't immediately respond but when she did, she said, "One thing that women are saying is that Mitt Romney is an extremely smart guy. He's been successful in creating jobs in the private economy, and that's something that Barack Obama has not been able to do."
– Tim Geithner today summed up Mitt Romney's contention that women had lost the majority of jobs in the recession: "Ridiculous," the Treasury secretary told This Week. "It’s a political moment. You’re going to see a a lot of politicians choose to campaign in fiction, but we have to campaign in fact." Pressed further, Geithner said the statement had "been largely debunked." "The crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody, and a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men because they affected construction and manufacturing." More from your Sunday morning dial, as per Politico: Darrell Issa on the Secret Service prostitution scandal: “The investigation will not be about the 11 to 20 or more involved, it will be about how has this happened, and how often. Things like this don’t happen once.” And furthermore: "What happens if somebody six months ago [or] six years ago became the victim of their own misconduct and is now being blackmailed? Is the whole organization in need of some soul searching, some changes before the president, the vice president, members of the Cabinet are in danger?” John McCain on Syria: “For the United States to sit by and watch this wanton massacre is a betrayal of everything we stand for and we believe in." The US needs to "lead for a change. Not lead from behind, but lead from in front. We need to get a sanctuary for the Free Syrian Army, we need to get them supplies, we need to get them weapons. It’s not a fair fight.” Reince Priebus on the Buffett Rule: It's "one single tiny alteration" that amounts to nothing more than "a shiny little object. If you add up every dollar of revenue that this little rule will put into place, it would add up to paying for 11 hours of the federal government." Michele Bachmann on Hilary Rosen's comments: "I thought it was shocking and insulting. I think women are going to be very upset." Bachmann on Romney: "I'm very seriously looking" at endorsing him. "I want to unite our party."