Even before this week’s economic indicators, the Obama campaign had signaled that it would do anything to distract voters from the economic malaise of Obamanomics. After today’s jobs report, that job will become tougher — but don’t expect Team Obama to change their strategy. In fact, as Charles Krauthammer rightly observes, Barack Obama and his administration has spent much of its time shaping the battlefield for the most divisive presidential election in history:
The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone.
What to do? Try fear. Create division, stir resentment, by whatever means necessary — bogus court challenges, dead-end Senate bills and a forest of straw men.
Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn’t close: 6 to 3, the majority including the venerated liberal John Paul Stevens.
Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can’t get into the attorney general’s building without one. Are Stevens, Carter and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black?
The ethnic bases covered, we proceed to the “war on women.” It sprang to public notice when a 30-year-old student at an elite law school (starting private-sector salary upon graduation: $160,000) was denied the inalienable right to have the rest of the citizenry (as co-insured and/or taxpayers — median household income: $52,000) pay for her contraception.
Despite a temporary setback — Hilary Rosen’s hastily surrendered war on moms — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will resume the battle with a Paycheck Fairness Act that practically encourages frivolous lawsuits and has zero chance of passage.
All of these will appear at some point in the next six months as campaign ads. We saw a bit of a preview of that in yesterday’s “Julia” rollout, which extolled all of the benefits of government dependency, while addressing none of its costs. It also says nothing about Obama’s economic policies or the stagnation they have produced instead of a robust recovery. Team Obama can’t address the economy without addressing their failures, which is why they will try to change the subject as often as possible.
The life cycle of a single mom certainly plays up the “war on women” meme, but even that is a bit of a tell. What has the Obama campaign so worried about the female vote? Normally they win that demographic anyway, and we can expect single women to break rather significantly towards Democrats as they always do. The full-court press on the “war on women” demonstrates that the Obama campaign is worried about losing among married women in a big way — maybe even starting t hit a stage of panic over it. Women, however, care about the economy just as much as men do, and most of them have no trouble getting their own contraception when they want it. They will want the same answers on economic policy as men do, as Hispanics do, and as left-handed Finns from Poughkeepsie do. Slicing and dicing demographics won’t allow Obama to hide from the stagnation created by Obamanomics for very long.
The RNC points out the inconvenient truths behind Obama’s “Hype and Blame” campaignVoters might be easily distracted over the summer, but the political bill for three years of economic stagnation comes due in the fall, and all of these distractions won’t keep Obama from paying the price.
0 comments:
Post a Comment