Democrat Marisa DeFranco is running for a US House seat in Massachusetts’ 6th Congressional District. She’s running against incumbent Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), who won re-election by a razor-thin margin in 2012 and is the presumed Democratic nominee this fall. However, as the only female candidate in the race, DeFranco isn’t too happy with the way she’s been treated as a primary challenger. In fact, she and her team are so fed up with the DCCC that they’ve blasted out a scathing press release, accusing the organization of blatant sexism for omitting them from a district-commissioned poll they recently conducted:
The Democratic Party holds itself out as the champion of women, but in a blatantly sexist move, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee commissioned a poll in our race and omitted Marisa's name from the poll. Yes, the party that has howled about the "War on Women" left Marisa out of the poll even though she is the only candidate to date who has qualified for the ballot in the 6th District of Massachusetts. Keeping a candidate out of a poll effectively mutes her voice and keeps voters in the dark as to their choices in a race. Where is John Tierney on this?
If the Republican party did something so disrespectful to a woman candidate and her supporters who have been working their hearts out, we would be hearing about the "War on Women" in every media outlet across the land. But the DCCC runs a poll with only the two men in the race and disregards the woman effectively writing her out of the picture and no one in the establishment blinks an eye. Why is John Tierney standing by, allowing a woman to be discriminated against?
This sexist double standard is unacceptable. Who needs Mitt Romney's etch-a-sketch when the Democratic machine can just as easily write a woman off with an eraser? If only 18% of Congress is women, and there is only 1 Democratic woman governor in the whole country, whose fault is that? Why doesn't the Democratic party run more women? And when they do run, why don't they include them in their poll and demand of themselves the equality for women that they do of the Republicans. Where is John Tierney on this? Standing by and doing nothing while a woman is slapped down is just as bad as bad as doing the slapping yourself.
Whoa. Be sure to click through the link above and read the whole thing. Team DeFranco essentially accuses the Democratic Party establishment of blatant favoritism and colluding against her, urging her primary opponents -- especially Rep. Tierney -- to take action. She also points out the obvious double standard here: if the Republican Party was excluding female candidates from GOP polls, Democrats would be apoplectic. And yet DeFranco's complaints continue to fall on deaf years.
But not everyone is staying silent. NRCC Communications Director Andrea Bozek criticized the DCCC in an email to Townhall: "The DCCCs exclusion of Marisa DeFranco from their primary polling is troubling for the party that claims to stand for gender equality," she wrote. "Their frequent rejection of women candidates exposes their blatant hypocrisy.”
Indeed. So before Democrats (once again) start accusing the GOP of waging a “war on women,” perhaps they should take a good hard look at what's happening in their own party first. That would be an appropriate place to start.
(H/T Legal Insurrection)