The sad truth about the 2012 women's vote

President Obama leads Mitt Romney by 9 percentage points in the latest Fox News poll. (AP)

It's time for some honest talk. It's not always pleasant and it's not always easy to hear, but it certainly beats talking points and trying to twist a narrative into a convenient pretzel.

You can't change reality until you face reality.

An August 7-8 CNN/ORC poll found that women today would vote for Obama (53%) over Romney (44%) if the election were held now. According to the same poll, 51% of women approve of President Obama's job performance (46% disapprove) and 48% of women believe the country would be better off if Democrats controlled Congress (39% believe we'd be better off if Republicans were in control). Fifty-eight percent of women hold a favorable opinion of Obama (40% unfavorable), while 49% of women have a favorable opinion of Romney (46% unfavorable).

Hold onto those stats for a moment.

On August 13, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that "The latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that President Obama leads Mr. Romney 54% to 39% among women. The gap gets truly staggering when it comes to college-educated women. Here, Mr. Obama leads 63%-32%."

I'm going to be blunt with you. The GOP has a very big problem when it comes to female voters. It has for a long time, and I'm concerned about both the ability to reverse it and what it says about the majority of women at this time in history.

In June, CNSNews.com revealed that "The number of American women who are unemployed was 766,000 individuals greater in May 2012 than in January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Women have been hit hard by Obama's policies. They have struggled to find jobs. In many families, they are the household leaders writing the checks, balancing the checkbooks, and watching their household debt climb with each passing day.

And yet it hasn't changed their allegiance to a party--and a president--whose policies have helped place them in that sea of frustration.

Female business owners are already being crippled by ObamaCare's tax hikes and the overall regulatory burden. They watched our president tell them "You didn't build that" after those women invested years of time, creativity, and money into making their visions a reality.

And still, so many of them continue to support our president's business-crippling, condescending, you-owe-the-government-for-your-success attitude.

Just a few months ago, the Obama camp released "The Life of Julia" campaign, a timeline of what cradle-to-grave government assistance would look like for a fictional female character. It should have turned the stomachs of self-proclaimed feminists who preach female empowerment, self-sufficiency, and the notion that women don't need a man--or anyone else, for that matter--to build the life they are capable of building themselves.

Instead, many of those "feminists" rallied behind Barack Obama's you-need-me philosophy, abandoning autonomy in favor of dependence.

Does Mitt Romney have the ability to gain some ground with female voters? Sure he does. Can Paul Ryan assist? Perhaps, especially given that the aforementioned CNN/ORC poll reveals that Ryan's favorability numbers are at 22% (with 15% unfavorability), and a whopping 43% of women had never heard of him. Perhaps Ryan can define himself before the Obama camp runs with their phony anti-woman campaign.

However, my biggest concern rests with the American women--and so-called "feminists"--who continue to embrace a philosophy of dependence. The same women who once decried fairytales where men rescued damsels in distress are now all-too-comfortable awaiting the rescuing hand of Big Daddy government.

That's what going backward really looks like.

So the question remains--If government dependence is unfortunately a popular tenet among so many women, can the GOP's talk of personal responsibility and self-reliance ever stand a chance?