“Plan B” & Team Obama Strategy
I certainly don’t get it. Team Obama’s strategic thinking behind the decision to overrule the FDA is either nonexistent or so crazily idiosyncratic as to be nonexistent. Read Digby:
Kicking the girls
by digby
Celinda Lake is one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent pollsters. She is obviously very well informed about the political implications of most policy decisions and I’ve never found her to be ideological in her assessments. Here’s what she said about the administration’s Plan B decision, via dday:
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said she could “not even remotely” understand the political calculus of the decision, saying it “alienates the base, causes conflict with women in the base, [is] bad for key groups of women like younger women and unmarried women, and doesn’t win the swing independent women.”
If Democrats cared as much about getting young women to the polls as they care about getting ideologically incoherent swing voters, they’d win in a walk. They are progressive and they are hostile to the GOP agenda on nearly every level. They have been the most loyal Democratic voter but they are demoralized and need to be reassured that the Democrats give a damn about them. The Plan B decision says the opposite.
It is 2011 and the idea that Democrats like President Obama and John Carney are still chasing after “ideologically incoherent swing voters” when they’d crush the Republicans by being relatively coherent Democrats perplexes me.
American Voters Plan C: Elect ideologically coherent Republicans.
Eventually, you’ll get it. You were close, but then you slipped back.
I think the difference between you and me is that you think the President should be more ideologically coherent because it is the ethically right thing to do. I think he should be more ideologically consistent because it would make him (and all Democrats) tough to beat.
Since we are coming from different perspectives, different things piss us off. Or at times, the same things piss us off but for different reasons.
I have no idea what this decision was about. There are quite a few moderate democrats that can bank on picking up some pro-life votes but the pro-lifers I know generally don’t care too much about plan B age-limits. He has offended far more people than he has placated.
It was about his pathological desire to pander to the right-wing.
It is a strange compulsion to be sure.
Requiring a prescription made a lot more sense when there were more Planned Parenthood clinics around.
Maybe Obama wants to position himself as the savior who is blocking Big Gubmint from turning your daughters into trollops.