Andrew Sullivan: How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right

[kpete]

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right
Feb 13, 2012 12:00 AM EST

Conservatives gleefully revived the culture wars. But they're not winning. How Obama set a trap for the right.

....................

Suddenly no-drama Obama was neck deep in the kind of religious warfare he vowed to avoid. Many pundits—led by older white Catholic men, such as Joe Scarborough and my friend Chris Matthews and even the fair-minded liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne—declared his decision on contraception as not only morally wrong but a politically disastrous violation of religious freedom. Suddenly the specter of 2004—when the culture-war issue of same-sex marriage gave Ohio and the entire election to George W. Bush—reemerged, and some conservative Catholic Democrats began to panic. Within the administration, almost all the white Catholic men opposed the decision—from Bill Daley to Leon Panetta. But critically, the support for the decision came from women, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and key adviser Valerie Jarrett chief among them. So Obama didn’t ignite just a culture war but a religious and gender war as well. Welcome to the election focused almost entirely on jobs.

But the conflict-driven headlines and predictions of disaster for Obama are, in my view, deeply misleading. Right now, they are driven both by cable news’s love of a good fight and high ratings and by the Republican primary campaign, in which the candidates, especially Newt Gingrich and Santorum, are desperately battling to unify the evangelical base, which is convinced its faith is somehow under attack. In the longer run, however, I suspect this sudden confluence of kerfuffles will be seen as one of the last gasps of the culture war, not its reignition. That’s especially possible since Obama’s swift walk-back last Friday, when he proposed an utterly sensible compromise, which exempts both churches and other religious institutions that cater to the general public from directly covering or paying for birth control, shifting the coverage requirement to insurance companies. So Catholic organizations will be able to stay out of the contraception question entirely, while contraception for all women will be kept free of charge. Instead of being lose-lose for the president, it became win-win. Most Catholics will be fine with this compromise, as are the Catholic Health Association and Planned Parenthood. But the bishops? They’ve gone out on a very long limb. This could be the moment when the culture-war tide finally turns and the social wedge issues long deployed so effectively by the Republican right begin to come back and bite them.

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

the rest:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/12/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-set-a-contraception-trap-for-the-right.html

[Ilsa]

1. Checkmate. (I hope.) nt

[BeyondGeography]

2. "Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct."

Just one of many strong observations in this piece.

Sully really can write up a storm.

[southernyankeebelle]

3. Love that No Obama drama.

[SaintPete]

4. Thanks for posting this

there is another thread floating around DU that I believe tried to make the same points, but could not (no fault of the other OP - it was the quoted blog that muddled the points ).

This snippet sums up everything:

"Catholic organizations will be able to stay out of the contraception question entirely, while contraception for all women will be kept free of charge. Instead of being lose-lose for the president, it became win-win."

[alphafemale]

5. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

They skipped into singing "Neener Neener." Idiots.

[RainDog]

6. can I get a witness?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002294712

I called this as a tactic to get Santorum voters to the polls during the Republican primary - and to show just how whacked out the tea party/religious right version of Republicanism is -

and the tea party, make no mistake, is almost entirely made up of the same faction as the religious right in the U.S.

[Beartracks]

7. Lotsa good observation and analysis here. Spot on stuff.

"So many Catholics support contraception in health-care plans, especially for the poor: because it prevents the far greater evil of abortion."

"The obsession among Catholic and evangelical leaders with an issue like contraception stands in stark contrast to their indifference to, for example, the torture in which the last administration engaged, the growing social inequality fostered by unfettered capitalism, the Christian moral imperative of universal health care, and the unjust use of the death penalty."

==========================

[JHB]

8. Balk. Sullivan has spent most of his career sweeping the cages of Republicans...

...so that they could pretend the howler monkeys they were breeding didn't stink. He doesn't get a pass just because he says something bad about them and something good about the administration.

A parry and riposte does not a trap make. I'm glad that the administration has learned not to endlessly compromise just because the RWers are going to call them radicals even when it isn't close to true, but it's less of a trap by the administration and more a sign of extreme, insulated, and reality-detached the RW has become. And the echo-chamber that unites them.

Krugman had a far better take on it, even though he isn't addressing this specific issue:

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/opinion/krugman-severe-conservative-syndrome.html

This wasn't so much a trap as RWers being so far gone (and so used to bullying) that they didn't even notice how far they were shoving themselves in peoples' faces.