Obama’s Unbecoming Presidential Campaign

Who knew the fate of the presidential election would tip on the number of women voting as if their lady parts depend on it? Early on in the presidential race, Barrack Obama’s campaign made the calculation to use young, unmarried, female voters, a group that leans heavily Democratic as a punch card for a second term. This voting bloc has been courted and pandered to by Obama more than any other this cycle.

The Obama campaign and its surrogates throughout the party successfully created a meme alleging a widespread Republican War on Women. They were helped along the way by Rush Limbaugh’s inadvisable slur of a student activist and more recently, by Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin’s reprehensible statement about legitimate rape. With two weeks to go until the election, the meme has become the signal that the Obama campaign has jumped the shark.

The War on Women has always been a cynical, small approach to the campaign. It compartmentalizes women, and in particular, young unmarried women from the rest of the electorate. The War on Women aims to strike a nerve in these women as though they are merely sexual beings, dwelling on the impositions inherent to their gender in the modern day USA. Never mind the economy, their prospects for getting a job after college or the national security of the nation; keep birth control free and abortions readily accessible.

Polling for Obama has been heading in the wrong direction since the October 3 debate. Female voters have led the slide, settling on Romney, largely closing the gender gap that Obama has enjoyed much of the year. Obama’s campaign, in an effort to reclaim these female voters and work its rank and file apparatchiks into a tizzy, has resorted to lambasting Mitt Romney for commenting on what he called “binders full of women” during the October 16 town hall debate. He was referring to binders full of female candidate resumes to fill his administration as governor of Massachusetts. Apparently, with two weeks until the election, this is an issue worthy of time on the presidential stump.