Here is what Democrats want us to think: Republican candidates are going to take away your contraceptive pills; they are going to go on some jihad against you in the bedroom, and the only salvation is reelecting Barack Obama.
First of all, Obama cannot run on his record. The last thing that he wants you to think about is what he has done while in office. He does not want you to think about Obamacare, because it has continued to remain unpopular, even to today. Now, they will continue to try to sell Obamacare is becoming more popular, but Democrats do not want to carry this flag into the main election.
Whereas Newt Gingrich is going to tell you over and over again that he is the only person on the ticket to ever balance the budget in our lifetimes, Democrats are not going to tout the passage of Obamacare as a great reason to vote for them.
What else have they done? They passed the Stimulus package, which was supposed to reverse the recession. More people believe that Elvis is alive than believe that the Stimulus package worked. Democrat Evan Bayh, when retiring said that if he created one job when he entered into the private sector that would be more than Congress has created in the previous six months.
Are Democrats going to run on the various omnibus bills that they have passed? Yes, at $1.1 trillion for one 2010 bill alone that was 2000 pages long, Dems do not want you to think about that.
Can Obama run on ending the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq? These wars have degenerated into chaos under his watch.
Most people who pay some attention to politics know the numbers:
| 2009 | 2012 | |
| UNEMPLOYMENT | 12M | 13.1M |
| GAS PRICES | $1.85 | $3.59 |
| FED DEFICIT | 10.6T | 15.2T |
| FOOD STAMP RECIPIENTS | 32M | 46M |
It doesn’t matter if Obama is at fault here or not; under his watch, things have gotten worse, not better, and he has spent huge sums of money from many generations to come in order to “fix” the U.S. economy.
Both the media and the Obama administration have tried to paint the economy as improving, but a lot of Americans aren’t buying it.
So, what remains are wedge issues and personal attacks. The media managed to drive Herman Cain out of the Republican race and Sarah Palin out of elective office and apparently, out of elective office aspirations.
What the democratic party knows is, there are a lot of voters out there who barely pay attention. Huge numbers of people voted for Obama, and yet had no clue about him or the other candidates. Some young people simply voted for Obama because he was cool and McCain was this doddering old man.
So Obama needs to capture these votes and to do it with manufactured controversies.
The controversy of the last month has been contraception.
Although Republicans are continually blamed for raising this issue, it actually first occurred in a Republican debate, brought up by George Stephanopoulos on January 7th, a former Clinton aide.
He said the question was a joke. He and Diane Sawyer had a bet that Stephanopoulos could make Romney say, “Contraceptives are working just fine.” A few days earlier, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Rick Santorum questions about state regulation of birth control.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, President Obama made to sovereign decision that some Catholic institutions must pay for forms of birth control including the morning after pill. When this became plainly unpopular, the President proposed a compromise, which did not come from any sort of discussion with the Catholic entities about a compromise.
The compromise is, insurance companies will now give out free contraception, which is essentially free to the insurance companies, even though it costs a huge amount of money to individuals (which stories generally ignore that contraceptive pills from WalMart can cost as little as $5–$15/month). And, to liberals, this makes complete sense. If the government requires it to be paid, then it’s free; if a person pays for it individually, the costs are beyond that person’s ability to pay.
Then there is the liberal operative at the Georgetown School of Law, Sandra Fluke [pronounced flook]. There are all kinds of law schools out there and there are a number of different medical plans, yet this woman chose to go to Georgetown, where there are some limits on contraceptive coverage. She said she is attending Jesuit Law School in her testimony. She is concerned that she and others who have spoken to her must come up with $3000 for contraception (which appears to be over the period of time that she is enrolled in school). She claims that contraception is not easily available elsewhere, that they are under crushing demand.
Fluke is a reasonable speaker, but her examples were weird. One woman, after being raped, did not go to her medical provider because she figured they would not help her. Another example was a woman who used birth control for other reasons, and received the birth control, even though maybe it might be denied.
Her primary point was, she should be able to get the coverage that she wants—including free birth control—at a Catholic University, no matter what.
I am certainly not an expert in the female reproductive system. However, it would make sense that, if a woman needed birth control pills for a reason other than birth control, that would be easily verifiable. It appears as though that was not really an issue, even though many people are arguing that is the main issue, where one person actually argued that more people took birth control to prevent ovarian cancer than took it for birth control.
What we have here is a typical Democratic issue. “I am a victim; my friends are victims. This is what we want; we should get it without any hassle or any extra cost.” And Democrats come to her aid, thankful to talk about anything other than the debt, the deficit and unemployment.
As a side note, Rush Limbaugh made light of this, which he often does, illustrating absurdity by being absurd (Rush has since formally apologized for his language and characterization of Fluke). However, in between the absurdity, Rush also throws in some actual information.
Now, it is doubtful that the Democrats can run with this for the next 10 months. However, expect there to be victim after victim, wedge issue after wedge issue, with a little class warfare thrown in. But do not expect Democrats to tout what Obama has accomplished (and he has accomplished a lot) and do not expect them to talk about Obama’s actual record.
As Rush Limbaugh said 2 weeks ago: “The Democrats don’t have one thing they can run on. There’s not one aspect of Obama’s first term that they can say, ‘If you want four more years of this, vote for us.’ They have to create fear, hatred, loathing, impugn the character, all that, of Republicans — and that’s what they do.”
This will be in Conservative Review #218
A retired math teacher who spends most of his time exegeting the Old Testament and, once a week, puts out an ezeen.