Keller @ Large: Spare Us The Useless, Repulsive Nonsense

BOSTON (CBS) - Hilary Rosen, the Democratic talking head who made a fool of herself on CNN Wednesday night by suggesting that stay-at-home mom Ann Romney has "never worked a day in her life" and, thus, has "never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues a majority of women in this country are facing," is a classic example of the type of smarmy partisan that dominate the cable TV political debate these days.

Listen to Jon's commentary:

You can find plenty of them on the right, crowding the set at Fox News with their pre-fabricated talking points smearing the Obamas every bit as unfairly as the likes of Rosen are trying to do to the Romneys.

These are the water-carriers for the politics of resentment, knee-jerk stereotyping, character assassination, and gratuitous over-simplification of complicated issues.

And while slack-jawed partisans on either side seem to gobble this gruel up, I can assure you, it nauseates the rest of us.

Yesterday, for my report on Channel 4, I went over to the Fresh Pond Mall in Cambridge to sample reaction to the spat from mothers and other women.

I like to do man-and-woman-on-the-street interviews at that mall because – contrary to the knee-jerk stereotyping of Cambridge as "the People's Republic" – the crowd there is politically diverse and thoughtful, and yesterday was no exception.

Only one woman out of about a dozen I spoke with scoffed at the notion that being a stay-at-home was "work," as Rosen did.

Almost all felt that a wealthy person could indeed relate to the struggles of those less well-off, even though they didn't seem old enough to remember FDR or Bobby Kennedy.

And one woman made the excellent point that the issue isn't which woman can relate best to the struggles of women, but whether or not the men in power are paying proper attention.

Ann Romney says women are worried about jobs and the debt issues her husband thinks he can win on.

Women also worry about war and the social safety net might prefer the incumbent.

We'll see.

In the meantime, please, both sides, spare us the useless, repulsive nonsense.

You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.