“Y
our first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy,” Lena Dunham says in a new campaign ad for President Obama. The minute-long YouTube clip features the star of the popular show “Girls” as she explains why young voters, particularly women, “are ready” to vote for Obama. Dunham describes her ideal man in flippant, cheeky terms and then compares a woman’s first time voting to her first time having sex.
The video is sick, yet it articulates— even epitomizes— Obama’s philosophy on the citizen-state relationship, his view of women, and the core values of his re-election campaign.
It’s creepy, but it’s business as usual for the president. It’s a natural extension of “The Life of Julia,” an interactive website released by the Obama campaign documenting the life of a fictional woman who depends on the government for her every need, including the event: “Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.” These awkward and bizarre appeals raise the question: how do these ridiculous ideas keep getting approved? A group of high-ranking Obama campaign officials got together and said it would be a great idea to release an ad that compares voting for the the first time to losing your virginity. Sometimes conservative candidates make errors and misrepresent their beliefs, but this isn’t a mistake. It’s a feature, not a bug.
And it’s telling. In the progressive worldview, not even sex is truly personal. Progressives subscribe to what the philosopher Hegel would call “the God state,” in which the government does whatever God would do if he actually existed. It allows humans to “play God.” Government is “the only thing we all belong to” a trite cliche used as a bludgeon for progressive causes, most recently in a video aired at the DNC. The famous and failed Obama campaign initiative encouraging brides to “register” for campaign donations in lieu of gifts adheres to the same ideology: the government is our highest community. Wedding gifts may help build a family, but that is less important than a national community. It’s a weird way to look at the world.
This is what the sexual revolution has wrought: the marginalization of women. The attempt to liberate women has reduced them instead to mere sexual objects. Treated as a special interest group, women can only care about “women’s issues,” such as birth control and abortion. Lena Dunham’s ad communicates that message, and it’s offensive and misogynistic. College-aged women care about much more, including finding jobs after graduation. But this underscores the fundamental policy focus of the Obama campaign: it’s targeted at those committed to progressivism, regardless of economic downturn.
The overwhelming majority of Americans, including women, believe the country is on “the wrong track,” but the Obama campaign pushes its one-word slogan: “Forward.” It’s not just ideologically incorrect, it’s a complete misreading of the issues affecting young voters.
But it’s ultimately unpersuasive. It’s hard to imagine an undecided voter in Ohio or anywhere of any age being convinced by this gross and desperate appeal to the 18-21 women focus group. It’s just another insulting Obama riff urging women to “vote like your lady parts depend on it,” a slogan that appeared briefly on the official Obama campaign Tumblr. My most important lady part is my brain, and I’m casting my first-ever presidential vote for Mitt Romney.
