Now that the presidential election is well underway and all of the candidates are being watched very carefully by the media, it’s probably not the smartest move to make an extremely stereotypical and insulting comment about women. Just a thought.
Well, John Kasich, one of the GOP front runners, clearly did not get the memo. On Monday during a town hall in Fairfax, Virginia, the presidential candidate was discussing how he got elected to the state Senate at 26 years old.
“How did I get elected? Nobody was — I didn’t have anybody for me,” he said. “We just got an army of people and many women who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and put yard signs up for me. All the way back, when things were different. Now you call homes, and everybody’s working.”
Later there was a reaction from the crowd when one voter stood up and said, “First off, I want to say—your comment earlier about the women came out the kitchen to support you? I’ll come to support you, but I won’t be coming out of the kitchen.”
You go, girl.
Thankfully, she wasn’t the only one who reacted to this. Once Hillary Clinton got wind of the comment, she tweeted, “It’s 2016, a woman’s place is … wherever she wants to be.”
It’s 2016. A woman’s place is…wherever she wants it to be. https://t.co/lkXdirHlap
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 22, 2016
Kasich has since apologized for his words. According to CNN, Kasich told reporters that he was on Clinton’s side. “I’ll be a little bit more careful, ” he said, “But I’ll continue to operate on a high wire without a net, and frankly, I’d like to see everybody who is running for president get out of the scripted role and start to be real and take questions.”
Kasich also told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday evening that his comments weren’t “intended to be offensive” and that “I’m more than happy to say, ‘I’m sorry’ if I offended somebody out there… And if you hear the whole thing, you’ll understand the context of it.”
The campaign is now doing damage control, trying to explain that this quote was part of Kasich’s ‘I’m a regular, down-to-earth guy’ routine.
“John Kasich’s campaigns have always been homegrown affairs,” Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for the campaign, said, according to the Huffington Post. “They’ve literally been run out of his friends’ kitchens and many of his early campaign teams were made up of stay-at-home moms who believed deeply in the changes he wanted to bring to them and their families.”
Well, sorry, man, but it still sounds pretty sexist—in context or not. Women aren’t confined to the kitchen, and they definitely don’t need a male candidate to get them excited about leaving it.