To help the federal government annex medical care, President
Obama recently turned to women. Not just any women but some
reliable allies and supporters of the White House Office of Women
and Girls.
That office, you may remember, was launched last March
under the oversight of presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett and
put under the executive direction of Obama fundraiser Tina Tchen,
who is called by the National Organization for Women “one of our
own.” The council is charged to perfect the lot of women in every
possible way and enlists the entire cabinet along with various
ambassadors, directors and administrators to get this ambitious
job done. Such an effort, of course, must require resurrecting
the liberal assumption that healthy, free American women are
helpless victims who can do little for themselves. On hand that
day to close the Bush era of treating women as capable citizens
and to launch a new era of the aggrieved were First Lady Michelle
Obama, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the AAUW, NOW,
NARAL, the National Center for Transgendered Equality, the Gay
and Lesbian Task Force, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned
Parenthood and lots more.
It was quite a send off, yet in the succeeding months these
victim feminists did not seem to stir up the attention and
activity they once did. One exception was the way in which they
bullied their way into what they considered the man-centered
stimulus bill and left their mark. Scholar and author Christina
Hoff Sommers reported the clash: “The National Organization for
Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s
Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center joined the
battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs.” They
demanded a “stimulus package that would add jobs for nurses,
social workers, teachers, and librarians in our crumbling ‘human
infrastructure.’” (Don’t those sound like the jobs feminists
complain that women were limited to in the 1950s? You’ve come a
long way, baby?) And what did the president do? “He did what many
sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint:
He changed his plan.” Henceforth the feminists’ “human
infrastructure” was part and parcel of the famous stimulus
plan.
Maybe that browbeating was enough to convince the White
House to put some more gals to work on the president’s
not-quite-turning-out-the-way-we-wanted health care matter. So,
at a White House meeting on September 18, out came the slogan
“Health Care is a Women’s Issue” along with the first lady and
140 supportive guests who had “been fighting for decades for
equality for women.” The Women’s Chamber of Commerce, the YWCA,
the National Council of Negro Women and all assembled heard
nothing about tort reform, or small business insurance pools, or
a national health insurance market. Instead they heard Michelle
Obama present her husband’s enormous assault on citizen
responsibility as a matter of equality and “the next step” for
women. They were told that women are “crushed” by our health care
system, that their treatment under the current system is
“unacceptable” and that “women are disproportionately affected
because of the roles we play in families and the jobs we do in
this economy.”
Did the first lady’s invited audience really agree that
women are not quite equal as long as they are managing their own
medical care? And can that victim pitch really persuade the rest
of us and rescue dwindling approval numbers? The folks in the
White House, guardians of dependence, seem to think so. But I
don’t think so and I have a hunch that most American women won’t
either.
