Rick Santorum will hold a party tonight in Steubenville, Ohio,
which he and his supporters hope will be a “Super Tuesday” victory
celebration. Yet the latest polls indicate that Mitt Romney could
win the Ohio Republican primary and, coming on the heels of
Romney’s narrow win last week in Michigan, a Buckeye State victory
might be enough to effectively clinch the nomination as the GOP
Establishment’s “It’s His Turn” candidate. Whoever wins the Ohio
primary, however, the result of today’s vote will be actual
news, in contrast to the ridiculous ginned-up controversy
that has
swirled around Rush Limbaugh for the past week. And the story
of how “SlutGate” became such an all-consuming affair is worth
re-examining chiefly because it demonstrates the operational
methodology of what the late Andrew Breitbart called the
“Democrat-Media Complex.”
Go back to Saturday, Jan. 7, when ABC broadcast from Saint
Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., a debate among six Republican
presidential candidates, with George Stephanopoulos and Diane
Sawyer as moderators. After the first commercial break in the
broadcast, seemingly out of the blue, Stephanopoulos
posed this question to Romney: “Senator Santorum
has been very clear in his belief that the Supreme Court was wrong
when it decided that a right to privacy was embedded in the
Constitution. And following from that, he believes that states have
the right to ban contraception.… Governor Romney, do you believe
that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped
by a constitutional right to privacy?”
For those unfamiliar with constitutional law, it is
necessary to explain that Stephanopoulos was referring to the
Supreme Court’s 1965
Griswold v. Connecticut decision. An 1879 law
forbidding the sale of contraceptives in Connecticut was
invalidated because, as Justice William Douglas wrote on behalf of
the court’s 7-2 majority, it violated “penumbras,
formed by emanations” which Douglas claimed to have discovered
lurking in the Bill of Rights. Conservative legal scholars have
long mocked this unusual doctrine of the Griswold ruling
as a travesty of judicial activism in which the Supreme Court
struck down a longstanding state law by creating from whole cloth a
“right to privacy” — a right utterly unknown to the Americans who
actually wrote and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Despite its legal implausibility, however, Griswold laid
the foundation on which was subsequently built the constitutional
“right” to abortion (Roe
v. Wade, 1973) and eventually the “right” to homosexual
sodomy (Lawrence
v. Texas, 2003).
Rick Santorum is a 1986 graduate of Dickinson School of
Law who spent years crafting legislation in Congress and is
therefore fully qualified to discuss this legal history, but what
was taking place in New Hampshire that Saturday night in January
was not a seminar on constitutional law. It was a Republican
presidential debate, and the ABC News moderator who raised this
question about contraceptives and “the right to privacy” is a
veteran Democratic Party operative. The television career of
Stephanopoulos is merely an extension of his work as a
communications director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential
campaign and subsequently in the Clinton White House. Like the late
Tim Russert (a lifelong Democrat who worked for Daniel Patrick
Moynihan and Mario Cuomo) and Chris Matthews (a former aide to
Democrats Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill), Stephanopoulos is merely
one of many who have followed the well-trod path from Democratic
operative to liberal media star.
Indeed, what Breitbart dubbed the Democrat-Media Complex
represents a revolving door, so that no one was really surprised
when Jay Carney, the former Washington bureau chief of
Time magazine, became White House press secretary in the
Obama administration. Nor, for that matter, does anyone make much
of the fact that (a) Carney was a frequent roundtable guest on
ABC’s This Week during Stephanopoulos’s tenure as host of
that Sunday show, and (b) Carney’s wife Claire Shipman is a senior
correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America, the same
program for which Stephanopoulos now serves as co-host. Such direct
personal and professional connections between the Democratic Party
and major national news organizations are so common as to pass
unnoticed in the day-to-day business of politics. Any Republican
who makes mention of these facts as potentially significant can
expect to be derided as a paranoid conspiracy theorist if he voices
the suspicion that perhaps Democrats in the media are using their
influence to help their fellow Democrats in political
office.
Such a suspicion, however, was hard to avoid on that
January night when Stephanopoulos raised the topic of contraception
during the New Hampshire GOP debate. Four days earlier, Santorum
had edged the longtime Republican frontrunner Romney in the Iowa
caucuses. Although Santorum is a staunch conservative who has
defended the pro-life doctrines of his Catholic faith,
contraception had played no role whatsoever as an issue in the
Republican campaign until Stephanopoulos asked his question in
Manchester. That question, however, seemed to be the signal-flare
that launched a carefully orchestrated effort to make contraception
a major topic of public controversy, an effort that has been pushed
relentlessly for the past two months by Democrats and their media
friends. The past week’s “SlutGate” firestorm about Rush Limbaugh’s
comments — which led to a number of advertisers
canceling their ads on his nationally syndicated radio program
— is merely a sideshow to the main event, namely the apparent
attempt by Democrats to derail Santorum’s challenge to Romney for
the Republican presidential nomination.
Ginning up a phony controversy about contraception
permitted the Democrat-Media Complex to change the subject in the
GOP campaign. Santorum had offered himself to Republican primary
voters as a “full-spectrum conservative,” contrasting his record
with Romney’s on a host of issues, including the 2008 Wall Street
bailout and global-warming theory. Most especially, however,
Santorum had criticized the former Massachusetts governor for his
“Romneycare” scheme, saying that Romney had provided the template
for Obama’s own national health-care plan. This would make it
impossible, Santorum repeatedly said, for Romney to provide the
kind of “stark contrast” necessary to defeat Obama in the general
election campaign. Santorum argued that if the central issue of the
2012 election was to be the repeal of Obamacare — as many
conservatives hoped it would be — then it would be the height of
folly for Republicans to nominate Mitt Romney as Obama’s opponent.
Even without the class-warfare arguments that would be made against
Romney’s background with Bain Capital and his support for the Wall
Street bailout, the nomination of Romney would be tantamount to
giving away to the Democrats the entire issue of compulsory
government-run health-care insurance.
Such was the central argument of Santorum’s campaign
coming out of Iowa, where his late-December surge had catapulted
him from sixth place to serious contender in barely three weeks.
Santorum’s speech on the night of the Jan. 3 caucuses won him
widespread praise, a flood of contributions came pouring into his
campaign coffers, and the former Pennsylvania senator arrived in
New Hampshire as the hot new celebrity of American politics. After
months of being ignored as a hopeless “second-tier” candidate,
Santorum’s belated emergence as a GOP contender presented serious
problems for Obama’s re-election campaign. Democrats did not
publicly acknowledge this fact until more than a month later,
however, when a
Feb. 17 Washington Post article disclosed that the
Obama campaign was troubled by Santorum’s appeal to working-class
voters in the industrial Midwest. The grandson of an Italian
immigrant coal miner, Santorum had an “ability to
connect with the population that is most disillusioned with Obama:
white, blue-collar voters,” the Post reported. For months,
Team Obama had been preparing for the 2012 campaign with the
presumption they would be running against Romney, who would be easy
to caricature as an out-of-touch wealthy elitist. Santorum’s
surprising surge for the first time caused the Democrats to
re-target their opposition research efforts to one of Romney’s GOP
rivals.
In light of these revelations and subsequent developments,
the Jan. 7 debate question from Stephanopoulos about contraception
and the “right of privacy” seems far more significant than it did
at the time, when many commentators dismissed it as silly and
irrelevant. It is now possible to discern how Stephanopoulos, Jay
Carney, and other members of the Democrat-Media Complex have
manipulated this phony contraceptive controversy, up to and
including the Feb. 27 appearance of Georgetown University law
student Sandra Fluke before a meeting of the House Democratic
Steering Committee.
Byron York of the Washington Examiner has explained
that this followed an attempt by Democrats to add Fluke as a
witness for a Feb. 16 hearing of the House Oversight and Reform
Committee. The attempted last-minute addition to the witness list
would have prevented members and their staff from adequately
researching Fluke’s background. Democrats may have been attempting
to conceal Fluke’s history as a
left-wing activist, including her assertion in a
law journal article that insurance policies that don’t pay for
sex-change surgery are guilty of “heterosexist”
discrimination.
At a Democrats-only meeting last week, Fluke claimed to
have surveyed her fellow students and found that 40 percent said
they “struggled financially” because Georgetown denied
insurance coverage for contraception, which Fluke asserted
“can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school.” This
claim was quickly debunked by
John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, who called a
local D.C. pharmacy and confirmed that a month’s supply of
birth-control pills cost only $9. This fact reinforced the
absurdity of an Obama administration proposal to compel insurance
companies to pay for contraception, without any “conscience”
exception for Catholic institutions. As Santorum has often said,
requiring health insurance to cover contraception — a relatively
low-cost item — is like requiring auto insurance to cover the cost
of oil changes or wiper blades. Fluke’s deceptive testimony should
have been seen as an attempt by Democrats to manufacture phony
evidence in support of the Obama administration’s policy. Instead,
when Rush Limbaugh used “slut” and “prostitute” to describe Fluke
on his radio show, the Democrats and their media allies
manufactured a phony controversy over Limbaugh’s alleged
“misogyny,” which served to distract from the original phony
controversy over the supposed struggles of students to pay for
their own contraceptives.
For two months, then, liberals have manipulated public
opinion to their benefit: First, to portray Santorum as an
“extremist” in order to make him unacceptable to GOP primary
voters, and then to generate absurd fears among women voters that
Republicans are conspiring to deny them access to contraception.
Finally, as an unexpected bonus, they were able to damage and
demonize their longtime bête noire, Rush Limbaugh, by
making a martyred victim of the deceptive witness Fluke. In each
scene of this masterful marionette show, the liberal charade has
been applauded by certain Republicans who were either too blind to
see the puppeteer’s strings or else too stupid to understand the
script.
Amid all this phony political stagecraft, America lost
Andrew Breitbart, one of the few conservatives who understood how
the Democrat-Media Complex operates, and who figured out how to
fight back. Maybe GOP primary voters in Ohio will decide to fight
back today. That would most certainly be shocking news to
Stephanopoulos, Matthews, Carney & Company, as well as to those
Republicans who have been cheerfully playing their assigned roles
in the show.
