What a Shrewd Republican Candidate for President Might Do

Note to Mr. Santorum: You’re doing it wrong. Fighting the “dangers” of contraception is not the ground upon which the presidency will be won. Though it is ground upon which the presidency could be lost, and with it any hope of stopping Barack Obama.

The fact is, ObamaCare has put contraception and the politics that follow it into the national conversation. The fact is, before ObamaCare, there was no mandate placed on churches or businesses to provide contraception coverage “free of charge,” which is itself a lie because there is nothing that is truly free of charge. Someone always pays — liberals don’t understand this, but the 80% of the country outside the liberal base very much does get this. The fact also is, that ObamaCare itself did not mandate this. It’s not in the legislation that we had to pass in order to find out what it said. The rule that does, has been drafted out of thin air or elsewhere by Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Sebelius and Obama did this for a couple of reasons, one of which is to provoke people like Santorum into saying things that make it easy to caricature them as wild-eyed fanatics intent on politicizing America’s bedrooms. But the fact is, it’s the Obama administration that made the explicit choice to politicize the bedroom and frame the election as a “war on women’s health.” Given another four years in office, who knows what else they’ll choose to politicize.

But Santorum is, as I said, doing it wrong. If you want to talk contraception, you have to frame it correctly or you walk right into “Santorum wants his own version of sharia” territory. But you shouldn’t talk contraception at all without talking about ObamaCare, and framing the issue as a mandate pulled out of nowhere, and foisted on an unsuspecting public through blatant lies about how it will be “free.” There is no free lunch…or anything else. And, ObamaCare remains unpopular. So talk about it and blame it on the man who signed it. It’s his albatross and he should be forced to own it.

But a shrewd Republican candidate would pivot from whatever insane, stupid gotcha question the mainstream media is asking today, to levy a serious economic charge at the president. That charge is, that Americans face personal pain because of decisions this president has made. We may be looking at $5 gas this summer in parts of the country. That means many of us will be paying an extra $1000 in gas to get to our jobs, get our kids to school, etc. That’s real pain, and the fact is the price of gas has increased 83% under this president. That number should get a whole lot more attention, along with the debt he keeps racking up in our great grand-children’s names. Obama caused the increase, by scuttling the XL Pipeline, which would have brought nearly 600,000 barrels of oil per day into the US economy and stabilized our fuel sources for decades to come. He caused it with his illegal offshore drilling permitorium and by unleashing the EPA on our energy producers. He caused it by so weakening America’s standing in the world that Iran doesn’t fear us, and keeps threatening the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 1/5th of the world’s oil flows on a daily basis. Barack Obama promised skyrocketing energy prices. He has delivered, while he keeps trying to waste our money on more Solyndras. Make him own his own record.

Simply put, under Obama and as a direct result of his policies, America is demonstrably less strong (and our enemies happily rattle their swords at us), and less prosperous ($1000 more in gas prices hurt personally and will hurt the recovery), and you can throw in that because of ObamaCare, we’re also less free (ideologically driven mandates may cost millions of Americans what’s left of their health insurance). A shrewd Republican candidate would make this trio — Obama has weakened America by making us less strong, less prosperous, and less free — a core part of his campaign.