Since he lacks a significant and popular domestic achievement, the president seems to have concluded that the way to a second term is through the mobilization of key constituencies rather than a broad-based appeal to middle America. He combines these appeals with cheap gimmicks to generate publicity and deflect attention from the Republican primary. Now that his job is in trouble, the man who enthralled millions during the campaign of 2008 has been reduced to just another transactional political panderer. The gloss is off. Even the liberal Washington Post writer Dana Milbank says White House hiring practices make “a joke of the spirit of reform he promised.”…

The cheapest shot of all has to be the president’s attempt to mobilize women voters by scaring them into thinking that the Republicans want to ban contraception. The media have been complacent—if not openly allied—with Democrats such as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who repeatedly has accused the GOP of engaging in a Taliban-like “war against women.” Intellectual giant Mika Brzezinski, for example, has described the Obama contraception play as “brilliant.”

Forget, for a moment, that all the so-called Blunt Amendment proposed was to enshrine the conscience protections for health care coverage that already are in place. Forget also that no conservative has actually argued for the banning of contraception. What the president did in seizing upon the Rush Limbaugh controversy was cynically attempt to turn a fight over religious liberty and abortion into a fight over women’s equality. This was a naked grab to reclaim women, who he won 56 percent to 43 percent in 2008 but who then broke for the Republicans, 49 percent to 48 percent, in 2010. Moreover, it is an attempt to drive single women to the polls in the numbers they approached in 2008. And it may turn out to be effective.