Former PM Campbell on Maher: GOP 'absolutely oblivious' to women's challenges

On "Real Time With Bill Maher" Friday night, Maher and his panel tackled both the GOP's War on Women and its first friendly-fire casualty, former RIAA president-cum-Democratic-strategist Hilary Rosen. Maher first noted that former Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), the presumptive GOP nominee, is less popular with women in polls than the GOP's last presidential contender, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), but suggested that the media was stupid for falling all over itself to cover Rosengate: "Perhaps America is a society that lives to find stupid, inconsequential, meaningless controversies and this is the new one."

He asked Kim Campbell, the former Prime Minister of Canada, "Why do girls not like Mitt?" She first noted on Rosen that, "women have been falling into this semantic trap in the debates for thirty, forty years, saying 'work' when they mean 'work for pay outside the home.'" Noting that Ann Romney, who Rosen said had "never worked a day in her life" had, in fact, worked hard to raise children but had the economic privilege to be able to do so, Campbell added, "There are many women who don't have the choice, who are going to work and raise children, and they have a whole array of challenges that face them. And the Republican Party has appeared to be absolutely oblivious to it, the Ryan budget, all of these things, to approach it like these aren't real issues."

The founder and editor of FreeBeacon.com, Matthew Continetti, saw fit to disagree with Campbell's assessment: "When you don't want to talk about [Obama's] record [on jobs], then that's when you turn to things like the so-called 'War on Women.'" But former Reagan budget director and Congressman David Stockman (R-MI) disagreed, saying that the lack of overall jobs was the problem. "The fact is that in March, we had 132.5 million jobs in this country, the same number as April 2000," he said. But, he added, the focus on religious-driven social issues in the GOP is distracting from economic ones: "They're entitled to have their antediluvian views if they want them. And if they want to believe the world was created in seven days, that's fine. But this isn't what governance, this isn't what policy, this isn't what the urgent issues of the day are about."

Watch the full video, courtesy of Mediaite, below.