The Illusion
Posted on May 3, 2012
Perhaps it was all part of a plan.
Still it seems oddly coincidental that just as revelations come out that the woman Barack Obama dated in one of his many autobiographies was actual not a woman but a composite of several women, the Obama campaign is unveiling Julia, another fake woman. Here is a tidbit from National Journal about Julia:
“If the 2008 campaign had Joe the Plumber, 2012 might have "Julia," a fictional woman created by the Obama campaign to show his strengths on women’s issues.
On Thursday, the campaign launched a webpage called “The Life of Julia,” tracking how the president’s policies have helped her throughout her lifetime and contrasting those to Mitt Romney’s policies. Starting at her childhood and ending at retirement, each slide shows an older Julia and a new policy. For example, at 31-years-old, a visibly pregnant Julia is at the doctor’s office. The caption reads, “Under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” As for Romney's policies, the site says, “Health care reform would be repealed.”
In case you didn’t know about Obama’s fictional girlfriend, David Maraniss wrote about her in his new book, an excerpt of which just come out in Vanity Fair this week.
“Much later, after the publication of his book Dreams from My Father, and after Barack Obama became famous, a curiosity arose about the mystery woman of his New York years. “There was a woman in New York that I loved,” he wrote. “She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseudonym—she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race. To that end, he distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds. Decades later, during an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve when he lived in Chicago.”
Now, I happen to think that this is an odd coincidence.
The same week that Obama’s composite girlfriend is revealed, the Obama campaign unveils a fake woman to make the point that he is pro-women.
Like these fakes composites, the Obama campaign has completely fabricated a phony Republican war on women. It is a bogus argument made simply to score political points.
But then again, everything Mr. Obama does is fake. It is all a composite of something, made up to score political points.
And maybe that is the deeper significance of this odd coincidence. It lets people know that the President, as John Boehner said last week, is an emperor with no clothes. It is all an illusion.