Op-Ed Columnist
The Party of Julia
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: May 5, 2012
A WEEK ago the Obama re-election campaign unveiled a slogan for the fall
campaign its answer to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” Bill
Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century,” and other successful re-election
pitches. There were reports that the slogan-writing process had been a
struggle for the White House, and the final product bore those rumors
out. “Forward,” the Obama campaign will be declaiming to Americans, which
feels like a none-too-subtle admission that a look backward at the Obama
economic record might be bad news for the president’s re-election
prospects.
But maybe the White House doesn’t need a slogan. After all, it has a
person instead: a composite character who’s been the talk of Washington
these last few days, and whose imaginary life story casts the stakes in
this presidential campaign into unusually sharp relief.
Her name is Julia, and she has the lead role in an
Obama 2012 slide
show that follows what’s supposed to be an American everywoman from
childhood into retirement, tracking everything the Obama White House’s
policies would do for her and everything the “Romney/Ryan” Republicans
would not. The list of Obama-bestowed benefits includes Head Start when
Julia’s a tyke, tax credits and Pell grants to carry her through college
and low-interest loan repayment afterward, guaranteed birth control when
she’s a 20-something and government-sponsored loans when she wants to
start a business, all of it culminating in a stress-free retirement
underwritten by Medicare and Social Security.
All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of Julia is ripe
for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal upper
middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her
early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and
spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will
not surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)
What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her
bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended
family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide
show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only
matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their
health care plan until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a
curiously patriarchal quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks
and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles
threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.
But if the slide show is easy to mock (and conservatives quickly obliged,
tweeting Julia jokes across the Internet), there’s also a fascinating
ideological purity to its attitudes and arguments. Indeed, both in its
policy vision and its philosophical premises, the slide show represents a
monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism.
On the one hand, its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of
existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability,
apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make
cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math. In addition to
ignoring the taxes that will be required of its businesswoman heroine
across her working life, “The Life of Julia” hails a program (Head Start)
that
may not work at all, touts education spending that hasn’t done much
for high school test scores or cut
college costs, and never mentions that on the Obama administration’s
own budget trajectory, neither Medicare nor Social Security will be able
to make good on its promises once today’s 20-something Julias retire.
At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s
relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative
critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life
of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older
liberalism did as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working
families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and
catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s
place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every
stage of life, and no decision personal, educational, entrepreneurial,
sexual can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow
subsidized by Washington.
The condescension inherent in this vision is apparent in every step of
Julia’s pilgrimage toward a community-gardening retirement. But in an
increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker
than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal to both genders
than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to
believe.
Apparently someone in the White House thinks so, which makes the life of
Julia the most interesting general-election foray by either campaign to
date. Interesting, and clarifying: in a race that’s likely to be
dominated by purely negative campaigning on both sides, her story is the
clearest statement we’re likely to get of what Obama-era liberalism would
take us “forward” toward.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-party-of-julia.html?_r=1&hp
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