Romney’s ‘binders full of women’ remark takes on life of its own

It wasn’t “there you go again” or “you’re no Jack Kennedy,” but one of the more quoted lines from the latest presidential debate might well be “binders full of women” -- at least if Democrats have any say in the matter.

Minutes after Mitt Romney claimed that he brought “binders full of women” to his Cabinet selection process in Massachusetts, the phrase was lighting up Twitter and had already spawned a new website.

The website https://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/ mocks Romney’s comment with a clever array of visuals including a Trapper Keeper -- a binder of yore, for those too cool to remember -- emblazoned with a single word in pink neon: “Women.” The site also shows a photo of Hillary Rodham Clinton, wearing sunglasses, with a bubble out of her mouth that says, “Romney still uses binders? LOL.”

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At the top of the page is a picture of Romney, with a speech bubble that quotes the binders comment, and shows a stack of binders next to photos of Taylor Swift, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

Other binder images on the site include one that shows a dolphin and a unicorn fighting underneath the words “Trap Her Keep Her” and one that reads “Crazy Cat Lady.”

Romney, during his debate with President Obama at Hofstra University in New York, recalled that when he assembled his Cabinet when he was governor of Massachusetts “we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our Cabinet.

“I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Romney added that after he filled his Cabinet and senior staff, the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that his staff had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state.

But that’s not what was bouncing around the Internet.

Binders Full of Women also has a Facebook page with more than 47,000 likes, although it joined Facebook about an hour ago.

A liberal “super PAC,” American Bridge, announced that it had purchased the domain name BindersFullOfWomen.com to “educate voters on Romney’s REAL record on issues important to women.”

DEBATE QUIZ: Who said it?

The topic was also trending on Twitter, with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeting, “I see #BindersFullofWomen is trending, but my take is that women should be holding up half the sky, not filling binders,” which was retweeted over 700 times. Vanity Fair’s Twitter feed added, “Newt Gingrich, watching from home: ‘Binders Full of Women’ is a great name for my memoir.”

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