Open Thread: The Life of Julia

Matthew Sheffield's picture

As you’ve probably heard by now, President Obama has admitted to fabricating a woman in one of his two autobiographies. Apparently, he’s had a hand in fabricating another woman, a hypothetical one named “Julia,” who supposedly is representative of just how helpful his policies are to women:

In the new Barack Obama campaign piece The Life of Julia, voters can “Take a look at how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime — and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It is one of the most brazenly statist pieces of campaign literature I can ever remember seeing.

Let’s, for the purposes of this post, set aside the misleading generalizations regarding policy in the ad (no one is innocent on that account, obviously). What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have — outwardly, at least — shunned.

It is also a mindset that women should find offensively patronizing. When they’re old enough, I hope my two daughters will find the notion that their success hinges on the president’s views on college-loan interest rates preposterous. Yet, according to the “Life of Julia,” women are helpless without the guiding hand of Barack Obama.

Of course, the use of an imaginary life can be illustrative of any political agenda, including those diametrically opposed to Obama’s. James Taranto has collected several of the best alternate scenarios of the Life of Julia which illustrate that this imaginary woman can be harmed by Obama’s political ideas.

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