FAR in the future, long after today's partisan passions have cooled, some enterprising women's studies doctoral student will be able to write a fascinating dissertation on the rhetoric and iconography surrounding gender in Barack Obama's 2012 campaign.
Such a dissertation might start with the Obama campaign's striking "Life of Julia" slide show, which portrayed an American woman protected from toddler-hood by the "steps President Obama has taken," and menaced at every turn by Mitt Romney's reactionary policies.
From there, it could touch on the campaign's unusual suggestion that Obama supporters use their wedding registries to solicit donations to the president's re-election effort. It might linger over the White House's elevation of Sandra Fluke, a progressive activist and Georgetown University law student, as a kind of martyr for free contraception after she was insulted by Rush Limbaugh. And it would probably conclude with the Obama campaign's release last week of a winking video from "Girls" creator Lena Dunham, urging young women to make sure their "first time" is with a "great guy" like President Obama. (Their first time voting — what do you think she meant?)
To today's Obama supporters, these forays — like the campaign's broader "war on women" framing, and its recent attempts to make the election a referendum on abortion in cases of rape — just emphasize that the president is on the side of female empowerment, sexual, professional and otherwise.
But given the way Obama's once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow's feminists may look back on his campaign's pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one. (Our future dissertation author may note with bemusement, for instance, that Dunham's ad mirrors a similar advertisement cut for ... Vladimir Putin.)
This paternalistic pitch assumes that liberalism's traditional edge with women is built mostly on social issues, and that Democrats — especially male Democrats — win when they run as protectors of the sexual revolution, standing between their female constituents and the Todd Akins of the Republican Party.
But that conceit is probably wrong. The gap between men and women on issues like abortion is overstated, and the female preference for Democrats predates Roe v. Wade. In a recent blog post, Christina Wolbrecht of the University of Notre Dame calls the gender gap "a recurrent, if not consistent, feature of presidential elections throughout the postwar era," which probably dates to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.
Not coincidentally, that was a year when Republican economic rhetoric took on a particularly individualistic cast. If there's a deep driver of the gender gap, it's usually views about spending and the role of government. Men are more likely to be libertarian, women are more likely to be communitarian, and this creates what Wolbrecht calls a natural "divergence in preferences for social welfare policies."
This helps explain why, among recent elections, the gender gap yawned widest in 1996 — not an election with many culture-war flash points, but a year when Bill Clinton relentlessly tied Bob Dole to the Congressional Republicans' attempted cuts to domestic spending and entitlements.
It also helps explain why Romney made ground with women after his performance in the first presidential debate — when he mostly pivoted toward the center on economic issues, and emphasized solidarity and community rather than "you built that!" individualism.
None of this means that the Obama White House's social issues appeals don't resonate with many female voters. But they're most successful as a form of narrowcasting — a pitch to a particular group of women, often younger and left-leaning and unmarried, rather than to the female population as a whole.
Which is why it once seemed safe to assume that Obama's social issues strategy was a way of solidifying his base, and a warm-up act for the fall campaign. He would extol Planned Parenthood and hail Sandra Fluke all summer, the theory went, and turn Clintonian and talk mostly about entitlements and economic security after his convention.
Instead, the idea of Obama as a kind of knight protector for America's Julias and Lenas and Sandras, waging a lonely counteroffensive in the war on women, has basically become the White House's concluding pitch not only to his base, but to female undecided voters as well.
An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney's line about "binders full of women" — in a tight-as-a-tick, economy-centric election, this is the message that Obama is relying on to push him back over the top.
Perhaps it will actually work. Perhaps the Electoral College will save the president. But I'll just say this: It's awfully hard to imagine Hillary Clinton closing out a campaign this way.
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