Hilary Rosen, a Democratic operative with SKD Knickerbocker, touched off a Twitter storm tonight after she went on CNN and said that Ann Romney has "never worked a day in her life."
The statement was tweeted and retweeted, with a number of people condemning the statement as an attack on the candidate's wife, who was a stay-at-home mom who also raised the couple's five boys, and who has suffered from MS and breast cancer.
Ann Romney, who is widely praised as her husband's most effective surrogate, took to Twitter herself for her first-ever post, saying, "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work."
A number of people leapt to her defense, and President Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina and top adviser David Axelrod tweeted out disavowals of a statement that seemed insensitive to stay-at-home moms and sounded like a devaluation of what Ann Romney's life was like.
"I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly. Her comments were wrong and family should be off limits. She should apologize," Messina tweeted.
"Also Disappointed in Hilary Rosen's comments about Ann Romney. They were inappropriate and offensive," Axelrod tweeted.
Rosen's firm also employs Anita Dunn, former White House communications director, and worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. Her critics on Twitter described her as an "Obama adviser," just a bit of a stretch in description, but not enough of one for some critics, especially after Democrats have hit Republicans for guilt by association with people like Rush Limbaugh for months.
Regardless, Rosen doubled down — tweeting back at Ann Romney, "I am raising children too. But most young American women HAVE to BOTH earn a living AND raise children. You know that don't u?"
And she went further in a Huffington Post blog item, saying Mitt Romney has to stop hiding behind his wife's "skirt," and condemned the "faux outrage" from the right.
Ann Romney, according to Dylan Byers, will be on Fox News tomorrow morning, giving the issue fresh life. And Ann Romney is known for giving strong interviews. Her husband is also guaranteed to be asked about it — and if the perception is she is being unfairly attacked, he will have won the cycle, and potentially many more to come. For Romney, who polls show facing a large gender gap with women and who has been trying to move away from social issues conversations, it could help him.
The flip side is that Rosen's comments are now getting oxygen beyond the Twitterverse (and the CNN-verse), letting Democrats underscore, without doing much to push it out themselves, the notion that Ann Romney, whose husband was a success in business, may not have had a life similar to some swing voters' lives, despite how hard she worked raising her kids.
Also worth noting — Messina's line that family should be "off limits." Given the criticisms that Michele Obama has received over the years, it seems likely that Rosen's comment will be highlighted by Democrats if something comes up in the future.
UPDATE: Rosen appears to have rewritten her Huffington Post blog post last night; the line about Romney hiding behind his wife's skirt is no longer there, and now the column mirrors one that ran on CNN's website.