Divider-in-Chief (13 page)

The Obama campaign released a web video in May that illustrates the difficulty it will have in reconciling its obsession with abortion and its need to address the economic issues voters care about most. The two-minute video is called “Letters to the President: The Dreams of Our Daughters.” In the first half of the video, a mother introduces viewers to her two young daughters, Daisy, six, and Caroline, nine. We learn about their hopes and dreams. “I love that my daughters dream so big,” the mother says, “and see no limits to their future.”

Then she says, “It is upsetting to me that in 2012 the use of birth control has become controversial.” Contraceptives constitute preventive care, she insists, and are necessary for most women. “Beyond that,” she continues, “it's a woman's right to make decisions about her own body and her own life. This is just one reason I'm so passionate about getting you reelected this year.” The video gives the impression that if Obama doesn't win reelection, Daisy and Caroline's “right to make decisions about [their] own bod[ies] and [their] own [lives]” will be in jeopardy.

That's not the case, of course. Nobody is proposing to outlaw contraceptives. The debate is about whether religious institutions will be forced to provide them to their employees free of charge. It is ludicrous and insulting to women's intelligence for the Obama campaign to advance the fiction that Republicans are trying to take away their birth control pills and devices.

It is difficult to think how contraceptives could be any more accessible than they already are. Democrats often defend the Obama mandate by informing us that 99 percent of sexually active women—including 98 percent of Catholic women—have used contraceptives. Assuming those numbers are correct, they make clear that contraceptives are readily available to most women. The government pays for insurance coverage of contraceptives for millions of its workers and for millions of low-income women through Medicaid, Title X, and other programs. Ninety percent of employer-based health insurance plans cover contraceptives.
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So this is really not about contraception. It is about coercing religious groups, in particular the Catholic Church, to follow the dictates of the Obama administration and the abortion lobby. And it is about Alinskyite politics—picking a demagogic fight, which the administration thinks will rally women to its cause.

As politics, this is sheer cynicism. Even abortion rights groups know that women aren't lacking in contraceptive options or information. In 2001, the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization affiliated with Planned Parenthood that analyzes reproductive trends, surveyed 10,000 women who had had abortions.
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Of those who were not using contraception at the time they conceived, 2 percent said they did not know where to obtain contraceptives and 8 percent said they could not afford it.

These facts help explain why, according to Guttmacher, among the 43 million sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant, 89 percent (including 93 percent of teenagers) are practicing contraception.
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The most revealing part of the “Letters to the President” ad comes near the end, when the mother/narrator says, “We need a president who will stand up for women's health and stay focused on jobs and the economic recovery.”

This one sentence captures the absurdity of the “war on women” meme. “Stand[ing] up for women's health” and “stay[ing] focused on jobs and the economic recovery” are about as mutually exclusive as things get in public policy. If Obama and the Democrats really wanted to stay focused on jobs and an economic recovery, they wouldn't be raising issues such as abortion and birth control. Their preoccupation with the non-existent threat to birth control has come at the expense of dealing with the very real economic threats the country faces.

And perhaps it is time to call the Obama administration out on its condescending assumption that “women's health” issues cover the gamut from “a” (abortion) to “b” (birth control). That's a pretty limiting view of women and their interests, and it speaks volumes about the Obama administration.

“
I
like hangin' out with women. What can I tell you?”

So said Barack Obama during a May 14, 2012, appearance on
The View
, a daytime talk show hosted by women for a female audience. It was the president's fourth time on the program, and he was clearly in his element as he gabbed about his marriage and his recently announced support for same-sex marriage.

Obama was in the middle of a series of events designed to reassure women that, despite the poor economy, he hadn't forgotten about them. Earlier that day, he had accepted an award from and delivered the commencement address at Barnard College, a prominent women's college.

But for all his feminist talk, there is an unmistakable air of condescension whenever Obama addresses women. As former CNN and NBC News anchor Campbell Brown put it in a May
New York Times
op-ed:

Polls suggest Brown's view that Obama condescends to women is shared by many Americans. This is especially true when it comes to the work women do. An April 2012 poll of 1,000 likely voters commissioned by
The Hill
, a Capitol Hill newspaper, found that “more voters think Mitt Romney and the Republican Party respect women who work outside the
home than think President Obama and the Democrats respect women who stay at home”—and by large margins.
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The poll also found that the presidential candidates and their parties were in a statistical tie among likely voters when it came to better understanding women's issues, with Obama and the Democrats taking 42 and 41 percent, respectively, and Romney and the Republicans taking 40 and 42 percent. But here's the kicker: 46 percent of the
women
polled said that Romney better understands women's issues, while 41 percent said Obama. More men than women assumed Obama was the women's candidate.

The working mom versus stay-at-home mom debate was introduced in April when Democratic activist and Obama administration adviser Hilary Rosen claimed during an appearance on CNN that because Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, had been a stay-at-home mom, she “actually never worked a day in her life” and therefore wasn't qualified to speak on women's issues.

Ann Romney shot back on Twitter, writing: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.”
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Under pressure, Rosen later apologized, and the Obama campaign tried to distance itself from Rosen, who, visitor logs revealed, had visited the White House thirty-six times.
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The episode reinforced the portrait of some liberal women's condescension toward women who choose to stay home. It was reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's remark in 1992 that she could have stayed home to bake cookies but instead decided to focus on her career outside the home. Ann Romney called Rosen's remark “a gift” to her husband's campaign.

Perhaps the starkest political divide among women exists between single and married women. Democrats have always fared better among single women by emphasizing reproductive issues, while Republicans
normally win married women by focusing on jobs and championing policies that assist families.

The single/married divide was on full display in
The Hill
poll. While single voters were far likelier than married ones to say that Obama is better on women's issues (54 percent to 35 percent), Romney was chosen by 47 percent of married voters and 26 percent of singles.

A CBS
/New York Times
poll reinforced the disparity. It showed Romney leading Obama among married women, 49 percent to 42 percent, but Obama leading Romney among single women, 62 percent to 34 percent.
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So while a divide exists among women, Obama has tried to exploit it by appealing to single women with a two-pronged campaign. One is the big lie that the GOP will try to deny single women contraception for their sex lives. The other is a bribe, telling single women that he has a whole plethora of programs to assist them in all they do.

In early May, the Obama campaign unveiled on its website an interactive (and very creepy) slide show titled “The Life of Julia.” It offered tremendous insight into the Obama administration's belittling view of women.

“The Life of Julia” was advertised as an examination of “how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime—and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It employs a timeline to examine the life of Julia, a fictional character who is supposed to represent the average American woman throughout her lifetime. It's pure pandering to young, single women voters, but its principal effect was to outline Obama's cradle-to-grave, government-directed vision for America.

We learn that Julia, at age three, begins the government's Head Start program, which gets her “ready to learn and succeed.” Later, with the help of government Pell grants, Julia goes on to college and has a career as a web designer (naturally). She enjoys universal health coverage and taxpayer-funded
birth control, which allows her to “focus on her work instead of worrying about her health.” Seriously—I'm not making this up.

Tellingly, though no man is ever mentioned (perhaps to allow for the possibility that Julia is a lesbian), we are told that at age thirty-one “Julia decides to have a child.” The word choice here is interesting. Rarely does one say, “I decided to have a child” in describing the blessed event. It's usually, “We're having a baby!” The emphasis on Julia's deciding on her own to have a child is no doubt intentional, and revealing of the left's obsession with a woman's needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Julia's son, Zachary, is apparently begotten through immaculate conception (or, since this is Obama's secularist utopia, sperm donation), because there's no mention of a father, husband, or boyfriend. But at age six, Zachary disappears and is never heard from again. Apparently in old age, he has abandoned his mother to be cared for by the almighty Government, which, after all, got her that far.

As far as we know, Julia never marries, and this might be the part of her life that most accurately reflects reality for modern women. Marriage is less likely than ever to anchor the American adult's life. In fact, according to the most recent data, barely half of American adults are married, the lowest share ever recorded.
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And the decline is continuing. Marriages fell by 5 percent between 2009 and 2010.
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From an electoral point of view, this is good news for Obama and the Democrats, who do so well with single women and so badly with married women. Though what's good for the Democratic Party is not necessarily good for America, especially American children, 41 percent of whom are now born out of wedlock, which, as all the research data show, gets children off to a far worse start than, say, life without Head Start.
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What's most striking about “The Life of Julia” is not what is included in Julia's life, but rather what—and who—is excluded. The primary institutions of American life—family, church, civil society (aside from the “community garden” she tends in her golden years), and the market—are
conspicuously absent or beholden to the government. In Obama's utopia, Julia simply cannot function without the lifelong intervention of the federal government. Julia is completely reliant on the nanny state at every stage of her life.

Barack Obama likes to say that, other than the Obama family dog, Bo, he is the only male in his immediate family. Obama presumably thinks that living in a female-dominated household gives him a special window into what women want. But once he moves from the White House's Executive Residence to the West Wing, Obama enters a boys' club.

In his book
Confidence Men
, Ron Suskind provides a detailed account of Obama's first two years in office, including the male-centric culture that pervaded the president's inner circle.