Saint Sandra (Roman Genn)
From the April 2, 2012, issue of NR.
By
November, nobody is going to remember who Sandra Fluke is. That’s what
Republicans need to keep in mind as they judge the political impact of
opposing the Obama administration’s latest health-care mandate. The
issue is likely to help Republicans in the fall, if they can keep their
wits about them.
They’re not doing that right now. Instead, they’re overreacting to
two mistakes that opponents of the mandate have made. Both involved
Fluke. After the Obama administration announced that it would require
almost all employers to offer insurance that covers contraception,
abortion drugs, and sterilization, whether or not those employers have
moral objections, Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) held hearings
before the government-oversight committee he chairs. The Democrats
requested that Fluke, a Georgetown Law School student and liberal
activist who favors the mandate, testify. But the request was denied as
too late. Since one of Issa’s panels had no female witnesses, the
Democrats then used the incident as an illustration for their story that
Republicans are waging a “war on women” by resisting the mandate. Press
coverage was brutal. Since then, Issa has been telling his House
colleagues to avoid the issue, and many of them have done so.
Then Rush Limbaugh gave the Democrats an even better illustration
by calling Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and saying that she should
broadcast her sexual encounters so that those forced to pay for her
contraception could view them. After several days of intense criticism,
he apologized. In the interim, President Obama called Fluke to offer her
moral support. Republicans got even wobblier. As the Limbaugh
controversy raged, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) told reporters
that she now regretted voting to overturn Obama’s mandate.
A strand of liberal opinion has long insisted that social
conservatives are opposed to contraception — are waging a “war” on it,
even — and that the public would rise up against them if informed of the
fact. The conjunction of the fight over the mandate and the success of
Rick Santorum in the Republican primaries helped them make their case.
Santorum had said in the fall that if he were elected president he would
denounce contraception. He has subsequently backed off this cause, and
no other Republican of note ever adopted it, but his comment lent
credence to the liberal spin.
The White House initially seemed surprised that liberal Catholic
journalists and politicians had joined the bishops of the Church in
criticizing the mandate, but it quickly found a way to divide Catholics.
It announced that it would at some future point issue new rules that
would supposedly enable religious institutions to avoid paying for
services they oppose. Instead the insurers would pay for them. To call
this arrangement an accounting gimmick would be an insult to CPAs. But
some liberal Catholics — notably the head of the Catholic Health
Association, who had previously given her blessing to Obamacare — were
willing to sign off on the administration’s attack on conscience rights
as long as it lightly disguised it. Media coverage has tended to treat
the administration’s PR stunt as though it were a substantive
compromise.
Having neutralized some opponents and watched Republicans stumble,
the Democrats think that they are winning this fight. Democratic
pollster Doug Schoen thinks that “the issue of access to contraception”
could cost Republicans the chance to take the White House and the Senate
this fall. Timothy Noah writes in The New Republic that
Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) has damaged himself as a
vice-presidential pick by helping to lead the opposition to the mandate.
Noah’s colleague Alec MacGillis warns that Senator Scott Brown (R.,
Mass.) will rue the day Republicans joined this fight.
Inconveniently for this thesis, Senator Brown has been moving up in
the polls as this battle has raged. There is no Senate race in the
country where the issue has been more prominent. Brown has taken a
strong stand against the mandate and gotten criticized for it by his
leading Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Warren. In a strategy memo
released for public consumption, Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett,
argued that Warren had hurt herself by becoming a liberal “culture
warrior” on the issue. Looking at the polls, Boston Globe
reporter Frank Phillips concluded in early March that “Brown may have
benefited from his positions on social issues in the last few weeks,
such as the one over whether Catholic institutions should be forced to
provide contraception in their health care plans for workers.”
Barnett’s memo noted that in standing against the mandate, Brown
stood with three Senate Democrats: Bob Casey (Pa.), Joe Manchin (W.
Va.), and Ben Nelson (Neb.). Only one Republican moderate, Olympia Snowe
(Maine), voted to keep the mandate. Add Murkowski to Snowe and there’s
still nothing like the pattern you would expect if this issue were
cutting strongly in favor of the Democrats.
Polling does not suggest overwhelming public support for the Democratic position, either. An NBC/Wall Street Journal
poll in early March asked respondents what they thought of “the federal
government requiring health insurance plans for the employees at
Catholic and other religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges to
offer free birth control coverage and mandat[ing] that the health
insurance company pays for that cost.” Result: 38 percent favored that
idea, and 45 percent opposed it. A question that mentioned that the
morning-after pill would also have to be covered yielded 34 percent
support and 49 percent opposition. The Hill, a newspaper
centered on Congress, released a poll on February 23 that asked
respondents whether what it described as the “recent contraception
debate” had made them more likely to vote for Obama or for the
Republican candidate. Thirty-five percent were more pro-Obama, 36
percent more pro-Republican. That was a pre-slutgate poll, and the
results might be different now — but if so it would just underscore the
point that when the country is considering the mandate itself, rather
than side issues, it is not a clear winner for the Democrats.
Political strategists will be looking closely at two groups to see if
they will change their voting behavior in response to this debate. The
Democrats are fairly obviously trying to use the issue to court single
women. They vote heavily for the Democrats — much more so than married
women, who sometimes even vote narrowly for Republicans. But they have
not traditionally been very interested in politics. The hope for
Democrats is that the false drama of a war on contraception will
motivate these women to show up to vote.
But it’s not clear it’s working out this way. On March 10, the Washington Post
ran a front-page story suggesting that the mandate had caused women to
move toward Obama — though it conceded that their movement toward him
preceded the emergence of the issue. In fact, almost all of that
movement preceded it. Two days later, the Post released the results of its own polling, which showed both women and men turning slightly against Obama during the weeks of the mandate debate. A New York Times/CBS
News poll found that women, by a 53 percent–to–38 percent margin,
believe that religious institutions should be able to opt out of
covering birth control; a 46 percent–to–44 percent plurality believe
that any employer should have this right.
The risk for the Democrats is that even if they increase turnout
among a portion of their base, they will also alienate Catholic swing
voters. The Democrats believe that the liberal Catholics’ endorsement of
the mandate will help them with this group. In the long run, this type
of divide-and-conquer strategy cannot work, because it depletes the
credibility of liberals within the Catholic Church. If more and more
Catholics come to see liberal Catholics as not only unwilling to defend
their church’s teachings but unwilling to defend the institution from
assault, the liberals will have fewer and fewer voters to deliver to
Democratic politicians and thus be less and less worth co-opting. In the
short run, however, there is no question that the split among Catholics
helps the administration.
Opponents of the mandate can take several steps to increase their
chances of persuading voters to side with them. Too many of them have
acquiesced to the White House/media line that what’s at issue is a
“contraceptive mandate.” The mandate also covers the drug ella,
sometimes dubbed “the week-after pill,” which induces abortion. It is to
the great credit of non-Catholics such as Senator Roy Blunt (R., Mo.),
the sponsor of the Senate bill to overturn the mandate, that they have
stood in defense of the freedom of Catholic institutions. But it is not
just Catholics who object to abortion drugs, and highlighting their
inclusion in the mandate would broaden the anti-mandate coalition. It is
also worth noting that if the administration is correct in claiming it
has the legal authority to impose this mandate, it has the authority to
require coverage of surgical abortions as well. Only political prudence
has stayed its hand so far.
Voters generally dislike arguments about social issues, and tend to
oppose whichever side they perceive as the aggressor in a fight over
them. Proponents of the mandate have skillfully exploited this fact:
That’s the point of their claims that Republicans are waging a war on
women, and it’s why the Limbaugh comments were so damaging. During the
debate over Blunt’s amendment, Democrats made it sound as though it
would work a radical change in American law by allowing employers to
veto their employees’ contraceptive decisions. Republicans did not do
enough to make the case that all they were doing was preserving current
policy. From the dawn of the republic until this very moment, no federal
law has required any employer to provide insurance with coverage he
finds objectionable. This freedom has not left Americans deprived of
contraception or forced them to get permission from their employers to
use it. It is this benign status quo that the Obama administration’s
regulation will upset.
Republicans would also be wise to reiterate their support for access to contraception. Writing in Bloomberg View,
libertarian journalist Virginia Postrel has argued that there is no
good reason to continue to require women to get prescriptions to buy the
birth-control pill. Perhaps Republicans should undercut the Democratic
attack by advocating a Food and Drug Administration review of the
policy.
The mandate should also be tied to Obamacare, the unpopular law that
gave rise to it and that it perfectly illustrates. (The mandate
authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to determine what
“preventive services” insurance should have to cover, and she decided to
include contraception, sterilization, and abortion drugs. Note,
however, that even the Congress of 2009–10, the most liberal one in
decades, refrained from actually enacting this allegedly popular,
commonsensical mandate.) The law places coercive authority over
sensitive matters in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, and it has the
potential to cause both needless strife and diminutions of freedom.
The political parties are in effect placing a bet on whether
Americans will mostly come to see the mandate in terms of religious
freedom or in terms of women’s right to contraception. Some of the
factors that make the Democratic bet look smart right now will fade over
time. Santorum, for example, is likely to be out of the picture in the
fall. The Catholic bishops have staying power, if they choose to use it.
They can ask every parish in the country to include, among the prayers
of the faithful at Mass, the plea that political leaders will respect
the conscience rights of religious institutions — and they can do it
every week. The narrative of imperiled access to contraception, on the
other hand, may be hard to sustain for an entire year, contradicting as
it does the lived reality of American life. The administration is
committing a crime against conscience. It may turn out to have committed
a political blunder as well.
— Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review. This article appears in the April 2, 2012, issue of National Review.
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