PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Ashe Schow: Dry cleaners press Obama over ‘gender-gap’ rhetoric.

America’s dry cleaners aren’t happy that President Obama used them as an example in remarks last week about the economic gap between the sexes.

They say the disparity in dry cleaning bills is more complex than the systemized discrimination Obama hinted at in his April 8 remarks about the so-called “pay gap” between the sexes.

As an industry, dry cleaners do not charge more for a woman’s shirt than a man’s shirt, they charge more for a hand ironed shirt than they do a machine pressed shirt. If you check your own dry cleaning bill, you’ll find that YOU pay more for the laundering and finishing of your hand ironed tuxedo shirt, than you do for the automated processing of your everyday traditional dress shirt! The price is in the math as calculated by the labor required not the gender of the client!

Simple math. Hand ironing takes more time and requires more skill, and therefore costs the cleaner more to produce. Because it costs more to produce, he charges more for the work.

But I doubt this distinction would make it into Obama’s rhetoric, given his propensity to continue using the misleading figure that women only make 77 cents for every dollar paid to men.

Nope. If a lie works with gullible, low-information voters — which is clearly Obama’s perception of the women he’s targeting — then he’ll stick with it.