John Kasich Says Women Could Do Maternity Leave Online, If Bosses Let Them

Also they shop for fruit a lot

BREAKING: GOP "moderate" John Kasich is still running for president! Yeah, we're every bit as surprised as you are. And he's got a bold idea about family leave that's sure to inject fresh life into his campaign, or at least ensure that his name gets mentioned a few times while people ridicule him. At a Friday town hall campaign event in Hampton, New Hampshire, Kasich was asked whether he supported requiring employers to provide paid family leave. Like any good Republican, Kasich is against such dangerous European ideas, which would be intrusive government interference in the sacred employer-serf relationship. The rest of his answer, however, was such an epic pile of nonsense, we wonder if he is actually a lost member of the Palin tribe:

The one thing we need to do for working women is to give them the flexibility to be able to work at home online ... The reason why that’s important is, when women take maternity leave or time to be with the children, then what happens is they fall behind on the experience level, which means that the pay becomes a differential.

And we need to accommodate women who want to be at home, having a healthy baby and in fact being involved, however many years they want to take care of the family.

If women want to work online while they're being mommies, he's good with that, which ought to be a huge relief to the gals behind the checkout counter at the Mega Lo Mart. Scanning groceries from a home laptop while changing diapers will take a little doing, but it's better than forcing new mommies to take paid leave, because that would hurt their career track and earnings potential. Except for one small detail: That's bullshit too, as ThinkProgress points out.

A woman who gets 30 or more days of paid family leave is over 50 percent more likely to see her wages increase than a woman who got no paid time off. Women who take unpaid leave, meanwhile, are more likely to wind up in a different job and often end up with lower pay than their previous one.

Fortunately, Kasich recognizes that every family has different needs, so he also explained that decisions about family leave ought to be "up to employers to try to be creative about this," so employers can find a solution that works best for the company's unique situation, and if employees don't like it, they can go get another job. This is the beauty of the free market.

[contextly_sidebar id="xXUD8ab9JtmVJQ00qGjwymnipfbO6BpW"]John "moderate" Kasich is such a terrific candidate on women's issues. From signing a gag rule on rape crisis counselors that forbade them from referring women to abortion providers, to bragging about how his "hot wife" likes to stay home doing the laundry, to connecting with Latina voters by reminding them that he alwaystips the hotel maids, John Kasich ought to be surging in the polls.

Instead, he continues trudging along in the lower tiers of the national polls, although maybe he should be excited that, in New Hampshire at least, he's rocketed up to a three-way tie for second place in the latest poll of GOP voters -- though they're all way behind that man with the thing on his head.

Maybe Kasich should tell another folksy story about his daughter asking him a question that no real 15-year-old would ever actually ask. Womenfolk just love cute stories about children, don't they? Maybe, to fit with his focus on telecommuting, Kasich could say his daughter texted him her precocious question. From home, where she's learning how to do laundry.

[ Columbus Dispatch via Jezebel / Think Progress / Monmouth Poll ]