Democrats walking into “war on women” trap of their own making

Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:

Do Democrats still plan to feature a “war on women” theme at their convention?  If they do, I argue in my column today for The Fiscal Times, they may well find themselves hoist with their own petard, after a week of watching accomplished Republican women speaking from the dais in Tampa.  Not only does the emphasis entirely miss the issues about which voters care most in this electoral cycle, the entire argument diminishes women to, well, to exactly what Code Pink reduced them in protests at the GOP convention:

The message from the Obama campaign and Democrats in general seems to be that women are somehow incapable of finding birth control on their own unless some paternal entity dispenses it to them, despite all evidence to the contrary.  They’re so incapable of this task that employers and schools have to hand it for them, no matter how much income they derive nor how much tuition they manage to pay otherwise.  This has already backfired during Team Obama’s “Life of Julia” campaign, which offered a creepy, solitary vision of a woman’s life approaching that of the song “Eleanor Rigby.”  Former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown wrote in The New York Times  that “Julia” was “a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.”

But it’s even worse than that.  The strategy segregates women from other issues as if they only have deep concern in this election over the status of their genitalia.  This theme came to ludicrous fruition in demonstrations by Code Pink at the Republican convention in Tampa, when activists showed up dressed as gigantic labia.  The scene provided an unintentionally revealing portrait of just how progressives see women in modern American society.

That is the true risk for Democrats who pursue this strategy.  After three nights of watching successful and accomplished women in the Republican Party discuss economic policy, job creation, and reform of the federal government for deficit and debt reduction, viewers will tune in the following week to see women considered as interested in little more than sexual reproduction.  Voters might well conclude that there is a “war on women,” but that it’s not the Republicans who are waging it.

Here’s a case in point — the HHS contraception mandate that Democrats will be hailing as liberation for women in the workplace and in universities.  Sandra Fluke is already scheduled to deliver a major speech at the convention on this topic.  But contraception isn’t difficult to find, nor is it expensive to purchase on an individual basis.  Almost six months ago, US News researched the individual cost of contraception for all of the options — and found that nearly all of them fell between $150 and $600 per year.

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