GOPs new method of enticing female voters to see their position on women health care as more open and flexible seems to have backfired after Mike Huckabee, a potential presidential candidate, made some comments about contraceptives on Thursday, the Associated Press reported.
During the Republican National Committee luncheon on Thursday, Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, said the Democratic party is winning female votes because they are promising birth control because women cannot manage "their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government," the AP reported.
"If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are hopeless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them with their prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it," Huckabee said at the meeting on Thursday, according to the AP.
The Fox News host hoped the Christian conservatives at the luncheon would applaud his position, but instead his speech merely highlighted Republican's major problem of reeling in voters who are not conservative Christians, the AP reported.
The Republican National Committee has been trying to "soften" their image among women who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 instead of Mitt Romney, according to the AP.
"Mike Huckabee has no idea what he's talking about," Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told the AP. "If this is the GOP rebrand a year later, then all they've gotten is a year older."
Jay Carney, press secretary at the White House, said Huckabee's comments "sounds offensive to me and to women," when asked about the comment, according to the AP.
President and CEO of the conservative group Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, Penny Nance, agreed with Huckabee's statement and criticized Democrats for the negative feedback, the AP reported.
"The president and others have profited politically from the false narrative that women are weak and need big government to be our savior," Nance said in a statement, according to the AP.
