So instead of running on their record, they are desperately grasping at straws. That's why, instead of campaigning on having added $5 trillion in new debt in just three years, or the slowest economic recovery in nearly a century, or the longest period of unemployment above 8 percent since the Great Depression (eat your heart out, Jimmy Carter!), Obama and the Democrats are igniting race and class warfare and trying to terrify the elderly with scary stories about Republican budgets that will have the old and sick tossed into the streets so fat cat Republicans can drive their SUV's while lighting cigars with $100 bills and laughing at the poor people.
The latest salvo in this campaign of division (having completely abandoned any pretense of the uplifting "Hope and Change" message he peddled four years ago) is the alleged "War on Women" supposedly being waged by those misogynistic, heartless Republicans. However, like most things coming from the Democrat Party today, this is nothing more than what comes out of the south-bound end of a north-bound bull ... good for growing tomatoes, but not as satisfying if you are searching for truth.
The undisputed champion of this message is DNC Chairman and liberal Chihuahua (loud and annoying, but no bite) Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. It has been a constant theme of hers for months now, highlighted by the drama surrounding Rush Limbaugh's comments regarding Sandra Fluke, a 30-year old feminist coed who demands a "right" to make the taxpayers pay for the contraceptives of hypersexual college girls and anyone else that wants them.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, this "War on Women" tactic blew up in their face recently, when Democratic media strategist and long-time lobbyist Hillary Rosen attacked Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney, on CNN, saying that she "never worked a day in her life" and therefore has no credibility on women's issues. The backlash was so immediate and so severe that Democrats all the way up to Obama himself ran scurrying like cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on, fleeing from Rosen's comments faster than an Obama supporter runs from an employment application.
To be sure, Democrats make such demeaning comments all the time (remember Hillary Clinton's comments mocking women who stayed home, where they "baked cookies and had teas," or her emphatic statement that she is not "some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette"). They usually get away with it, though. This time, however, it did not turn out so well for them for a number of reasons, not the least of which being, unlike Hillary Clinton, who tended to be brazen and caustic as First Lady, Ann Romney is immensely likeable. This is a woman that chose to stay home to raise five sons while surviving cancer and multiple sclerosis. She has very quietly amassed an impressive resume as someone deeply involved in charitable works, including numerous programs directed at helping inner-city youths, as well as receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award for her work with Operation Kids. She was also a board member for United Way.
The clear intent of Rosen's comments was to continue the long tradition in militant feminism of demeaning and devaluing the absolutely most important work that a woman can do on this Earth (in my humble opinion), that being the raising of children to become honest, decent, responsible citizens and worthwhile members of society. I would argue that anyone who has experienced what it takes to raise children and yet argues that it is "not work" needs to be psychologically evaluated for issues of mental instability. As the father of eight children, I can solemnly attest that my wife does more work in the first three hours of her day than I do in the 10-12 hours I usually spend at the office.
Maybe that is why the outrage towards Rosen's comments was so thorough; tens of millions of Republican, independent and Democrat women, who daily struggle with the demands of balancing "for-pay" work and raising children, or who are stay-at-home moms who sacrifice the extra income from the corporate world in order to be at home to nurture and develop our most precious asset, our children, rightly saw this as an insulting attack on the work that they do.
Have we become so foolish as a nation that we ignore or devalue the immense value inherent in raising children and working to develop, nurture and maintain strong marriages and homes? For anyone that doubts the value of having a mother in the home full-time, with a father who provides for the family, you can skip all the rhetoric and opinion and simply look at the FBI's own crime statistics, which show that stable, two-parent homes, especially where one parent stays home, does more to reduce the likelihood of a child engaging in criminal behavior than anything else. Imagine the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that could be saved annually if we did more to encourage this parenting structure! Increased education, lower crime rates, fewer divorces , less drug use; it all is detrimental and costly to society, and it can all be mitigated or reversed with stable homes.
I'd also like to make a few final comments regarding the supposed "GOP War on Women." It is conservative Republicans that have long fought the good fight to end the horror of abortion. More than 54 million children have been slaughtered in the womb in this country since the ruling in Roe v. Wade, and more than half of those were baby girls. How can one reasonably argue that protecting the lives of these unborn girls equates to "war" against those women living? So the failure to force taxpayers to pay for contraception is engaging in that war, but the actual killing of baby girls is not? I guess that depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
And it is not just this country where the true war is being waged. One of the very first things Obama did as president was to rescind the Reagan-era Mexico City policy denying federal funds to international family planning organizations that provide abortions. Obama fully supports the U.N.'s Fund for Population Activities, an innocuous sounding program that, among other things, helps facilitate the rounding up of Chinese women to have forced abortions to maintain China's monstrous "one-child" rule.
There is indeed a war being waged against women today, but it is not by the Republican Party, the very same party that passed the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote against vicious objection by the Democrat Party, and the party which fights to allow these girls to be born in the first place so that they can one day grow up to vote. The Democrats may have mastered the spin on this topic, but the truth is not on their side.
Louis DeBroux is a Taylorsville resident, married, with eight children. He is chairman of the Bartow County Republican Party. He owns Gatekeeper data backup and recovery. He can be emailed at led@gatekeeperbackup.com.