Well, they’ve only gone and done it now. It looks as if the GOP is actually going to nail its colors to the mast in 2012 on the proposition that employers should have the legal right to refuse to provide health care on grounds of “moral conviction”, and that any company of any kind or any size can get out of paying for contraceptive care as long as the boss is sufficiently Catholic.
I mean, look at what happened here. The bishops went mental saying that Catholic entities like hospitals shouldn’t have to pay for birth control. Obama backs down, saying that insurers will have to bear the burden of providing it free of cost so the assorted institutions aren’t on the hook at all. And the bishops’ response – aided and abetted by the GOP in the Senate – actually doubles down, saying that NO company should be obligated to pay for birth control.
Meanwhile, the backer of Rick Santorum’s primary SuperPAC* goes on TV and rolls out the terrible prehistoric crack about the aspirin between the knees as birth control, which was probably funny for about ten minutes in 1961 but could not possibly do more to cement the fact that the Republican ethos in 2012 is that most Southern of beliefs: we can make things the way they used to be.
This is it. When they invoke the past, that’s what they mean. Not a manufacturing base that was heavily unionized, not a top marginal tax rate of 91%, not nuclear-tipped stalemate against the Soviet Union. What they’re peddling is cultural hegemony. Homosexuals back in the closet. Negroes quietly in their place. Ladies who know their place is in the home. That’s the pitch. They can’t run on a rapidly improving economy, with GM posting record profits after the federal restructuring and unemployment slowly waning and Apple passing oil companies in revenue while carrying the S&P 500. They can’t run on foreign policy, with Bin Laden and Qaddafi’s faces painted on the “kills” fuselage of Obama’s administration.
So this is it. Pleasantville. They’re pushing all their chips to the middle of the table and betting that enough people want to live through Mad Men again that they can knock off a President who isn’t even the right color. As stunning as it is, we’re apparently going to spend the spring 0f 2012 re-litigating Griswold v. Connecticut and exhuming pre-Vatican II debates about the Pill, fifty years after the fact.
That’s your choice this year. That’s the whole campaign, that’s the motto and the mission statement for Team Obama, that’s all you need to run on:
Forward, not backward.
* Santorum is out lashing back and saying that he’s no more on the hook for what Foster Friess says than Obama is for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Maybe, maybe not, but Wright wasn’t the guy bankrolling the Obama campaign, so that dog won’t hunt, son…