Divider-in-Chief (11 page)

Exit polls showed Clinton performed better among older and white working class women but that Obama won younger, minority, and highly educated women. Obama was aided by timely endorsements from prominent female Democratic office-holders, including governors such
as Christine Gregoire (Washington), Janet Napolitano (Arizona), and Kathleen Sebelius (Kansas), as well as liberal cultural icons like Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy.

After Clinton suspended her campaign in early June, Obama's general election opponent, Republican Senator John McCain, initially thought he might be able to lure disgruntled Clinton loyalists to his side.

But that hope quickly vanished, and in the general election Obama captured 56 percent of female voters—more than any Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
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He achieved this even though Alaska governor Sarah Palin's name appeared on his opponent's ticket.

Obama's promise of hope and reconciliation drew many women to his side. As Governor Gregoire said in explaining her endorsement, “He is leading us toward a positive feeling of hope in our country and I love seeing that happen.”
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By Inauguration Day, Obama's approval rating among women stood at 71 percent.
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But the “positive feeling of hope” that many women felt towards Candidate Obama faded soon after he became president. Less than two years later, in the historic 2010 mid-term congressional elections, female voters abandoned Obama's Democratic Party in droves—a development that was interpreted by most observers as a rebuke of Obama's first two years. According to exit polls, Republicans won female voters for the first time since 1982.
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A post-election poll commissioned by EMILY's List, a political action committee dedicated to electing liberal women, explored why so many women abandoned the Democratic Party in 2010.

In “Winning Back the Obama Defectors,” pollsters interviewed 608 women who had voted for Obama in 2008 but did not vote for their Democratic congressional candidate in 2010.
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Among these “Obama drop-off voters,” 66 percent chose not to vote, a third voted for Republicans, while the remainder cast their ballots for a third-party candidate.

Among the “GOP defectors” (women who voted for Obama in 2008 but for the Republican congressional candidate in 2010), 77 percent said
they were motivated to switch sides by dissatisfaction with the economy; 57 percent said they voted Republican in part to express dissatisfaction with the Democratic leadership in Congress; and 48 percent said they wanted to express opposition to President Obama.

Among former Obama voters who did not vote in 2010, a majority (51 percent) said they wanted to express their dissatisfaction with the state of the economy.

Also, when “Obama drop-off women” were asked to think about the qualities they saw as most important in deciding which candidates to support in future elections, their clear preference was for candidates willing to work across party lines (36 percent) and those who care about the average person (35 percent).

Aisle-crossing was even more important to former Obama voters who subsequently voted for a Republican congressional candidate, with 40 percent stating that uniting people across party lines was important.

The EMILY's List poll underscored the sense of disillusionment many women felt toward a president who had failed to deliver on his promises of hope and change.

Obama and his party's troubles with women were just beginning. Nearly a year later, in August 2011, Obama's Gallup job approval rating among women hit an all-time low of 41 percent.
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Clearly, millions of women had been let down. And it's no secret why. Women have been devastated in the Obama economy. But instead of addressing the real concerns of women and their families, Obama and his Democratic allies advanced the ludicrous notion that Republicans and the Catholic Church were threatening to take away their birth control pills.

The facts underscore the painful toll that Obama's policies have taken on women.

Obama is on thin ice when he points his finger at conservatives, suggesting they are engaged in a “war on women.”

Obamacare, the president's signature first-term domestic policy achievement, will have a devastating effect on women. It will constrain the choices they can make for themselves and their families. According to the Kaiser Foundation, roughly 80 percent of mothers choose their children's doctors and control their family's health care.
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But under Obamacare, millions of families will lose that choice and their employer-based health insurance. According to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, senior
fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, 20 million Americans will be moved into Medicaid, where they will have no choice of doctor.
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Also, because women see doctors on average more often than men, they will be more bound by Obamacare's decrees defining “essential benefits” coverage, treatment options, and payments to doctors.

More women than men depend on Medicaid. About 9 million non-elderly women and more than a third of all births in the United States are covered by Medicaid. By shifting an additional 20 million people to Medicaid, and consequently overloading the system, Obamacare will make it more difficult for these women and their children to find doctors.

Medicaid outcomes are already bad: there is a shortage of doctors in the Medicaid system, it's more difficult to get a diagnosis and treatment, and Medicaid patients endure longer wait times and suffer more complications from surgery than other patients. Obamacare will make this worse.

Obamacare also has significant negative tax implications for women. In fact, according to Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, Obamacare contains twenty new taxes or tax increases on American families and employers.
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These taxes don't affect just the rich. According to Norquist, there are five that hurt women the most.

First, under Obamacare's highly controversial “individual mandate,” all Americans will be forced to purchase “qualifying health insurance” by 2014. Those who do not will face a penalty that will reach at least 2.5 percent of adjusted gross income by 2016.
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It won't be enough for women simply to purchase health insurance; it must be a “qualified” plan—approved by the federal government. Obama sold his reform proposal by assuring the public that under his proposal, “if you like your plan, you can keep it.” But that's not true. It may not matter
if a woman likes her plan. If it is considered by the government to be “not qualified,” she will have to find a new one.

Another way Obamacare taxes women is through the so-called “Cadillac plan” excise tax. Starting in 2018, Obamacare will impose a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans (those with premiums over $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families).
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In essence, this will punish women who might use higher-cost plans because they have larger families or because they have chronic ailments or are older but not yet eligible for Medicare. For women who already have high medical costs but have purchased insurance to help cover them, Obamacare levies an enormously punitive tax.

Another Obamacare tax increase on women is the “medicine cabinet tax,” which is a rule within Obamacare that prohibits people from using their flex-spending or health savings account pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines. These are often exactly the types of items busy moms need—from pain relievers to cough medicine. This tax went into effect in January 2011.

A related tax is the cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs), which begins in 2013. The tax limits to $2,500 per worker the amount of money they can put into their workplace flex accounts. Norquist notes, “For many families, some out-of-pocket health care costs will no longer be pre-tax. This will be particularly cruel for families with special needs children, who have high out-of-pocket medical costs and often use pre-tax flex accounts to ease the burden for them.”
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Another Obamacare penalty that has already taken effect is the tax on tanning salon sessions. As ridiculous as it sounds, Obamacare has imposed a 10 percent excise tax on tanning bed sessions since July 2010. Most of the headlines these days are about how tanning beds can be abused. But this should not obscure the fact that most tanning bed customers are women and most salon owners are women—and some of these women are not going to be able to afford the tax.

A 10 percent “tanning tax” may not sound all that significant. But according to Joseph Levy, vice president of the International Smart Tan Network, it's going to close some salons (most tanning salons are small businesses) and jeopardize 9,000 jobs. “You can't just pass on a tax like this to customers and not have it hurt your business,” Levy told CNN in 2010.
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The tax is expected to take $2.7 billion out of taxpayers' hands over ten years.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, and other nanny-state liberals champion this tax as a “behavior modifier,” but free market enthusiasts believe it's not the government's proper role to destroy those businesses the president doesn't like.

I asked Ryan Ellis, tax policy director for Americans for Tax Reform, to sum up Obamacare's tax implications for women and families. “Obamacare raises taxes on families, especially families with children,” he said. “There is almost no way in which families interact with the healthcare system which is left untouched by an Obamacare tax hike.”
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Google the term “Republican war on women” and you'll find hundreds of thousands of references to what has become one of the Democrats' primary indictments of the Republican Party. The “war on women” meme is an election year ploy by Obama and his liberal allies to divert attention away from important issues—particularly Obama's poor stewardship of the economy—and toward political stunts meant to pander to and energize women voters, especially Obama's feminist base. It's a gambit Democrats seem intent on playing all the way to Election Day. And it assumes women are gullible enough to fall for it.

It all began with an announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Under Obamacare, all insurance plans will be required to cover “preventive health services” free of charge.

“Preventive health services” include relatively uncontroversial things like immunizations and mammograms (though these became temporarily controversial when it appeared that Obamacare might ration them stingily). But it also includes highly controversial measures such as sterilization, contraception, and abortion-inducing drugs, including emergency contraceptives, or “morning after pills,” ella and Plan B.

On January 20, 2012, Sebelius announced that the administration would not exempt religious groups that object to having to cover these more controversial items.
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The Catholic Church rejects sterilization, artificial contraception, and abortion as gravely immoral, the latter for the taking of a human life, the former for separating sexual activity (possibly) from the confines of marriage and (more certainly) from its reproductive aspect and potential, which in the Church's view violates its meaning and integrity.

Sebelius then offered what she probably thought was a grand concession: religious organizations would have until August 2013, one year later than originally planned, to comply with the new rule.

The one-year delay (after which non-complying organizations would face heavy fines) was offered to give Catholic employers time to incorporate birth control into their plans. “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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To be clear: the new rule included an exemption for certain “religious employers,” including churches and certain houses of worship. But the exemption was so narrow that it was almost meaningless. A religious employer couldn't qualify for the exemption if it employs or serves a large number of non-Catholics, as most Catholic hospitals, universities, charities, and social service agencies do. These religious agencies that do so much good for society were given two alternatives: drop health insurance for their employees or shutter their doors.