Column: ‘Women, doctors, local political leaders’: How Dr. Oz handed Democrats a path to victory
Michele Bachmann on CNN recently accused MSNBC of playing games with the presidential election: “This is a very complex issue, if you have to game it, you shouldn’t be doing it. If you go in there and you start trying to trick and intimidate people, then you should be ashamed of yourself.”
The fact is that “this is an issue that’s going to be decided in the heartland, if not the heartland,” Bachmann told Larry King. “Everybody in the heartland is going to be watching this.”
It is a shame that Democrats are willing to use the very same tactics that they claim to abhor. But the problem is that the Democratic Party establishment and the mainstream media are both in agreement. In fact, as Michelle Goldberg pointed out in a recent New York Times column, “When you look at the coverage and the debate on the issue, you find that a fair amount of it has been very similar.”
This is an important point. The reason that the media is not covering this issue with the same urgency is because it goes right to the heart of their agenda: to turn the presidency into an unelected, unaccountable president. That’s not a bad goal to have, but it must be carefully implemented with great consideration and precision.
The Democrats know that if they get away with it, millions of Americans are going to flock to them. That’s what happened with the 2008 elections. The Democrats’ big problem is that they’ve gotten away with it before. They’ve made the 2012 election about something they can’t control, about a woman’s right to choose, that can be reversed by the mere threat of legal action. It’s a perfect example of how Democrats will take advantage of this issue because they know they’ll have no problem getting the public support they need to keep the issue in the news. It is a question of tactics, and Democrats have been doing the same thing for years.
The way they did it in 2008 was with an emotional issue. Barack Obama’s opposition to the Bush tax cuts was a “move to the