The Republican Party continues its quest to reach out to moderate women, as one of its leaders over the weekend lamented that “dumb ass people” elected Kyrsten Sinema.

Or as he called Arizona’s first female senator: “Senator Madonna.” This, as opposed to when she was campaigning as “Senator Barbie Doll.”

Arizona’s national GOP committeeman, Bruce Ash, is in a lather over the fact that Arizona voters opted to send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 30 years.

So naturally, he went right for the important stuff: what she looked like at her swearing-in.

“Sinema looking more like Senator Madonna than the Senator Barbie Doll she advertised when she ran for election in 2018,” Bruce Ash posted on Facebook on Saturday. “Her politics and positions will lean further left than the dumb ass people on our side ever imagined when tens of thousands left their ballots blank in the McSally-Sinema election which led the way to her being seated in the U.S. Senate this past week.”

So, he's talking about moderates

By “dumb ass people on our side,” I wonder: Was he including the moderate Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who put Sinema into the Senate?

I'm guessing Ash cannot imagine why moderate women would reject the Republican nominee who cozied up to a president who makes many women want to vomit. Can’t fathom why they wouldn’t support the former fighter pilot who treated the election as a war exercise rather than an exercise in democracy. (Just wondering, would that make Martha McSally "GI Josephine Barbie?)

But, hey, at least McSally branded Sinema a traitor, not a Barbie doll — an acknowledgement that her opponent has an actual working brain cell or two.

It's doubtful the woman who has three degrees — a law degree, a master's degree and a Ph.D. — woke up last week, pranced over to her closet and suddenly decided to go all Elle Woods to be sworn in as Arizona's first senator.

Voters gave Congress a bold new look

Sinema's choice of a pink coat and a polka dot purse was surely calculated, and it was brilliant. Who didn’t think immediately of the pink tutu featured in McSally’s endless attack ads, in which the GOP nominee called for Arizona to elect “strong leaders”?

So Ms. Sinema goes to Washington in her pink getup — and later in a retro-looking gray fur shawl — showing that a woman can be strong and feminine, too. Those bare shoulders buried once and for all an arcane dress code that should have gone out in the 1960s.

Like it or not — and clearly, Ash is a “not” — the times, they are a changin’. Even in the blue-suited hallways of the United States Senate.

America has given Congress a bold new look, one that includes a record number of women, including Muslims, Native Americans and yes, Sinema, the first openly bisexual senator — sworn in on a copy of the Constitution, not the Bible.

A woman who isn’t afraid to be all that she can be. Smart, savvy and yes, looking spectacular.

Senator Madonna? Senator Barbie Doll?

And the Republicans wonder how their big tent has begun to collapse into the party of the pup tent?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.

MORE FROM ROBERTS: