Musings Of An Indie WriterComments
Comment Form
Original Post
Obama’s Bayonet
A politician of the modern sort -- i.e., one who regards "his" office as really, truly his and will do anything to remain in it -- will be forever alert to the possibility of losses of support from those voters who were instrumental in propelling him into office. That necessity can undermine his policy agenda...assuming he has one.
I don't think there's much doubt that Barack Hussein Obama has a policy agenda, do you? All the same, the man wants a second term -- he wouldn't be campaigning so hard, otherwise -- and it appears that he might be ready to back away from his recent assertion of power over First Amendment freedom-of-religion rights:
The Obama administration is willing to work with Catholic universities, hospitals and other church-affiliated employers to implement a new policy that requires health insurers to offer birth control coverage, a top adviser to the president's re-election campaign said on Tuesday.David Axelrod, a senior campaign adviser to President Barack Obama, said the administration had heard the Church's concerns and never intended to "abridge anyone's religious freedom."
But he gave no sign that the administration would reverse course under intensifying pressure from Church leaders and political heat from Republican presidential candidates.
"This is an important issue. It's important for millions of women across this country. We want to resolve it in an appropriate way, and we're going to do that," he said in remarks on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
White House spokesman Jay Carney also sought to diffuse criticism from Church leaders, telling reporters later on Tuesday that the administration would work with religious organizations "to see if the implementation of the policy can be done in a way that allays some of those concerns."
Fifty-two percent of American Catholics who cast votes in November 2008 cast those votes for Obama. That's one hell of a lot of votes: probably enough, were he to be deprived of them, to eject him from the White House. It raises some interesting questions about the acumen of his political strategists.
But Obama has been caught in a cleft stick on this issue. His hard-left base has demanded that every employer and every medical-care institution in the country be shackled to their dream of "universal health care." That dream includes free contraception, abortion on demand, and several other items that Catholics have been taught are absolutely, irremediably morally wrong. But objections of conscience be damned: the Left wants socialized medicine, and it knows it can't get there from here without first imposing top-down, one-size-fits-all controls on every person, business, and organization in the country.
The ambiguous qualifications offered by Axelrod and Carney suggest strongly that the original move was a trial balloon -- that Obama and his political handlers wanted to "probe with the bayonet" in authentic Leninist style and thus discover whether there’s any steel beneath the Church's cassock. They had some reason to suspect that the Church would roll over. When it reared up on its hind legs, it probably came as a surprise to them -- and now we'll undoubtedly see a reprise of the old "good czar / evil counsellors" ploy, in an attempt to preserve Obama's portion of the Catholic vote for November.
Will it work? Unclear, if we interpret "work" to mean "win Obama a second term." After all, there's that hard-left base to consider. They aren't likely to be happy about any exemptions granted on religious grounds. Whether that would be enough to keep any substantial number of them home on November 6 is difficult to predict.
The usual calculation in such a situation proceeds from a key question: Can the voters I've just pissed off go anywhere else? The answer generally arises from the "hardness" of the offended bloc. The more ideologically absolute the voter, the more difficult it is to predict his response. Seldom will he "cross the aisle;" the possibility is unlikely even to occur to him. But he might abstain from voting, which is bad enough if the candidate has been counting on his support.
This is the second cleft stick of recent development. The first was the Keystone XL pipeline: the unions want it badly, but the enviro-Nazis oppose it with all their shriveled anti-human souls. It appears that Obama's strategists are betting that the unions are more solidly behind Obama than the green bigots. We shall see when the votes are tallied, especially the votes from union-power states such as Michigan and Ohio.
Whatever the ultimate outcome, conservatives cannot help but take some cheer from these events. The supposed "master politician" and his Chicago crew of finaglers have become entangled in their own political underwear. It's a possibility permanently inherent in special-interest-coalition politics -- and one conservatives have been hoping would enmesh The Won ever since his inauguration.
