Rolling with the martial theme of the current edition of Newsweek -- "The Obama Conquest Lucky General or Master of the Game" -- writer Michelle Goldberg exulted in the GOP's defeat with her story, "The War on Women Backfires." "Republicans thought they could get away with the endless attacks on the fairer sex. They couldn't have been more wrong," thundered the subheadline (emphasis Newsweek's).
Of course, as we've noted here at NewsBusters, Goldberg conducted her own war on conservative women earlier this year with an attack on the "insufferable" Ann Romney. But conservative women, apparently don't seem to matter to Goldberg, who sees as misogynistic the notion of cutting off federal taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood, which of course happens to be the nation's largest abortion provider and hence largest murderer of unborn baby girls:
Still, the massive gender gap vindicates the president’s strategy of making issues like support for Planned Parenthood and insurance coverage for contraception central to his campaign. All modern Democratic presidential candidates run as defenders of Roe v. Wade,
but Obama was unique in foregrounding women’s health, turning Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards and Georgetown Law graduate Sandra Fluke into major campaign surrogates. Some Democrats worried that he’d gone too far, particularly after a line about making abortion “safe, legal, and rare”—a formulation coined by Bill Clinton—was left out of the 2012 platform. It turns out, though, that a great many women responded to a candidate who defended their rights without hesitation or apology.
It goes without saying that Goldberg failed to critique the Left for treating women voters as simply the sum of their lady parts nor did she examine the role liberal media outlets played in hyping the "war on women" meme.
From Planned Parenthood's "Yes, We Plan" to Lena Dunham's voting-for-Obama-is-like-losing-your-virginity ad to this cynical, exploitative Web ad in the closing days of the campaign, the Left went for the women's vote by whipping up fear over reproductive rights issues rather than treat them as voters concerned with the economy, foreign policy, deficits and the debt, or presidential leadership. It was arguably the Left that waged war on women's intelligence by their campaign tactics.
But again, to Goldberg, what matters most is making conservatives gun-shy about touching the sacred cow that is Planned Parenthood. From the conclusion of her story:
The defeat of Akin and Mourdock, however, is going to make this interpretation a hard sell, as does the fact that Obama proudly trumpeted his pro-choice positions. That means that going forward, at least some Republican leaders are likely to be newly wary of alienating women. The House will be as conservative as ever, but it’s hard to imagine that it will soon make another threat to shut down the government over defunding Planned Parenthood. The new women in the Senate might even be able to make some progress on issues like equal pay. After Tuesday, any politician who is seen as fighting a “war on women” is going to know that he’s a likely casualty.
