Wendy Davis's R opponent in the 2014 campaign for Texas governor recently reached a new low for Republican gut-ter politics (and get her politics) with his tasteless Abortion Barbie smear. If you've wondered how low the Rs will go, the As low as necessary answer of an earlier Reagan/Bush era seems in the post-Rove epoch to have morphed into an As low as possible current strategery.
This AB ad campaign shows an unprecedented disdain for a woman's ability to choose, or even have a conscious thought process in choice, with its implication that women give no more thought to that choice than they would to a child's toy. In light of recent statements from their side of the aisle, apparently a lot of male Republican politicians don't give women credit for any conscious thought process, even apart from this very weighty decision that I personally would bet very few if any women make lightly. I imagine the conversations among R males that sound like Of course you can't expect a woman to make the right decision about abortion when most of them can't even figure out what they're doing behind the wheel and other variations on that theme. The AB campaign represents the latest restatement of an old right-wing chestnut we've heard over and over again for the last 40 years: An abortion is too important a decision to be left up to a woman.
On another level, though, AB also represents the latest R appeal to gut-level politics, aimed straight at the mob-mentality reptile brain of the target. When the salesman wants to sell something, especially if that something has a sizable percentage of snake oil, he doesn't want the target to think about it -- if he can get the targeted voters to loathe and fear Wendy Davis by making them believe she is AB, then they will flee into the arms of the darling R candidate, breathless and sweaty from the run. This has worked well for the Texas Rs in recent history, and they hope it will again, because who would vote for this latest candidate if they actually thought about it, or the last two before him?
Like all other human beings, I too have a reptile brain, and it tells me that the madmen who crafted the AB campaign earned their paychecks. When I say madmen, by the way, I don't know if they actually work out of an office on that famous avenue, but I do expect that they are all men. However effectively this ad works on the reptile brain, though, it stirs a much different emotion in me than the one intended -- it makes me angry, because I also have a higher brain capable of critical thinking, and that part of my mind detects the potent stench of snake oil in this AB concoction that insults the intelligence of anyone who truly has intelligence. I sincerely hope that enough Texans also pick up on that offensive odor and make the smarter choice in November, rather than the more fearful one.
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