Quotes of the day

“I feel GREAT about our Julia web tool & LOVE the Repub freak-out”

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“Mr. Obama’s advisers are clearly hoping that the idea of Julia will capture the public’s imagination the way the Harry and Louise ads did two decades ago. The story of the fictional couple worrying about their health care helped crystallize opposition to Mr. Clinton’s proposals…

“It’s not clear that Mr. Obama’s effort will have as much effect. In 1993 and 1994, the health insurance group that broadcast the Harry and Louise ads spent millions of dollars to run them on television. So far, Julia lives only on an Internet page.

“And Julia could backfire on Mr. Obama if voters get the impression that the president has to invent characters who are benefiting from his policies because he can’t find real people to portray the situation.”

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“In the new Barack Obama campaign piece The Life of Julia, voters can ‘Take a look at how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime — and how Mitt Romney would change her story.’ It is one of the most brazenly statist pieces of campaign literature I can ever remember seeing.

“Let’s, for the purposes of this post, set aside the misleading generalizations regarding policy in the ad (no one is innocent on that account, obviously). What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have — outwardly, at least — shunned.”

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“From the overarching narrative of drab dependency to the comically blunt and clumsy contrasts with Romney, the utterly unironic pseudo-edginess (‘Julia starts her own web business’), the self-caricaturing lifestyle liberalism (‘this allows her to volunteer at a community garden’), the un-self-conscious intermixing of the vocabularies of liberty and entitlement (‘thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control’), the imagery of studied nonchalance, and the whole look and feel of the enterprise, it appears to have been created by people deeply immersed in the culture of overeducated twenty-something hipster self-effacement but unaware that it is all intended sarcastically. It’s like Portlandia earnestly offered up as a drama…

“Above all, though, the Life of Julia is deeply telling of the view of American life underlying contemporary progressivism. Mitt Romney has taken to describing President Obama’s vision of America as one of a government-centered society. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of what he means than this.”

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“‘That’s their dream for women?’ asked Wendy Wright, a social conservative leader and acting director of the conservative Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute. ‘That she be alone, without family, struggling as a single parent, dependent on a government that is going broke?’

“‘This is not the American dream,’ Wright told The Daily Caller. ‘It’s creepy. … It’s what China promises its people.’”

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“‘The Life of Julia’ is, of course, another of the Democrats’ never-ending efforts to lock up the ‘women’s vote.’ But that is a misnomer: what the Democrats really dominate is the single women’s vote. Single women do vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Why? Because they worry that they may need to fall back on the government for security. Married women, on the other hand, change their priorities: their first object is their family’s well-being, and most of them consequently vote Republican. Notice that at no time in ‘Julia’s’ life is she ever said to have a husband.

“In a sense, I think that the Democrats’ crude slide show and the conservatives who mock it are ships passing in the night. Sure, ‘Julia’ validates everything Mitt Romney says about Obama’s vision of a government-centered society. Sure, as conservatives tweeted, ‘Julia’ depicts Americans as helpless losers who can’t do a thing without a government handout. But the sad truth is that the Democrats know their audience. There are a great many Americans, most but by no means all of them women, who evidently are not embarrassed by the fact that their life plan consists of using government to get their hands on someone else’s money. What conservatives see as the life of a pathetic loser, Democratic voters see as a heck of a good deal.”

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“The CBO tells us that after 2037, the debt-to-GDP ratio will remain above 200 percent, but it doesn’t have an annual breakdown after that. It does have projections on government spending through 2085. According to the data, by the time Julia celebrates her 73rd birthday, government spending would equal 76 percent of the nation’s economic output. To put that in context, it would mean that avoiding an annual deficit would require collecting taxes at more than quadruple the post-World War II average of roughly 18 percent of GDP.

“Of course, these numbers are all hypothetical, as the economic and financial system would collapse well before we reached this point. What’s Obama’s plan to spare Julia from such a bleak scenario? As his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ‘We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.’”

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“#Julia is bummed. Her share of the national debt went up $16,345 under Obama…

“#Julia, about to graduate, can’t find a job in the Obama economy…

“#Julia the commuter has to pay double for gas from what she paid 4 years ago…

“#Julia in the future won’t have Social Security thanks to Obama”

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“Alas, Team Obama has omitted a few milestones from the life of Julia:

“4 months: Julia’s mother decides that giving birth will be hard on her figure. She kills Julia. Under Barack Obama, her right to do so is absolutely nonnegotiable.

“10 years: Trapped in a failing and dangerous public school, Julia (another Julia, not the dead one) is terrified and miserable. Under the Obama administration, protecting the government education monopoly from competition and accountability is almost as sacrosanct as abortion. School-choice programs are severely constrained or eliminated. Julia falls behind…

“57 years: Julia (different Julia, not one of the dead ones) has been paying very high taxes for most of her life, mainly to support three federal programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, the payroll tax diverts about 12 percent of her income — income she might have saved — into the entitlements. Under President Obama, stubborn refusal to reform these unsustainable entitlements means that the programs have to be radically cut or entirely eliminated, and Julia and her whole generation get hosed in spite of the fact that they have been taxed for decades under the phony promise that they were ‘paying into’ the programs. The only alternative to massive cuts was an 88 percent increase in all federal taxes, which already have been rising to offset costs from Obamacare, which were wildly underestimated.”“So basically OFA’s Julia campaign is the footsteps poem, but for Obama instead of God?”

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