The Contraception Trap

"If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."

- Sun Tsu.

I've lost count of how many times I've criticized Obama on something and it turned out that Obama did the right thing. I was certain that this recent "debate" on contraception would hurt the President politically; and when this issue started to gain steam, the last thing I thought was that Obama was setting a trap for the GOP. Moderate Republicans saw this trap coming from a mile away, but I did not.

Andrew Sullivan is the latest political commentator to suggest that Obama did in fact set a trap. Sullivan writes:

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.

A friend of mine, Slic[k], stated last week that this was in fact a trap, and the goal was to create a wedge between Republicans given that RomneyCare contained a similar provision with regard to contraception. I was initially skeptical, but now I think Slic[k] was right.

As noted by Sullivan: "Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue." I have no doubt that Santorum will be all over this in a few days, as will that former Pennsylvania Senator who is currently pursuing the GOP nomination (his name escapes me). Have fun trying to clean up that frothy mess, GOP.

It was certainly an elegant trap, given that it relied in large part on the GOP's refusal to agree with Obama on any issue. He gambled that Republicans would disagree with any compromise no matter how reasonable it was, and the gamble paid off big time. To paraphrase Sun Tsu, Obama knew his enemy.

Obama also successfully framed the issue as one involving contraception, and not freedom of religion like the GOP wanted. When was the last time the Democrats won a framing battle?

This debate reminds me of the Terri Schiavo debacle, the GOP's disastrous attempt to create a wedge issue based upon a wildly distorted view on the sanctity of life. Schiavo was a catastrophe for the GOP because every family in the country has either gone through something similar or knows someone who has.

Birth control presents the same type of problem for the GOP. As Sullivan notes: "Even in conservative Mississippi, a recent ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban the morning-after pill failed badly at the polls." In other words, the GOP should have seen this one coming, but did not. And neither did I.