[I]t once seemed safe to assume that Obama’s social issues strategy was a way of solidifying his base, and a warm-up act for the fall campaign. He would extol Planned Parenthood and hail Sandra Fluke all summer, the theory went, and turn Clintonian and talk mostly about entitlements and economic security after his convention.
Instead, the idea of Obama as a kind of knight protector for America’s Julias and Lenas and Sandras, waging a lonely counteroffensive in the war on women, has basically become the White House’s concluding pitch not only to his base, but to female undecided voters as well.
An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney’s line about “binders full of women” — in a tight-as-a-tick, economy-centric election, this is the message that Obama is relying on to push him back over the top.
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