Where went common sense?

I can remember back when I was a kid, when being against birth control was seen as almost as nutty as not believing in evolution.

It all seems so damn long ago. Way back in the modern era, when no one knew how backward we were.

This is not to say that I use birth control, or care whether anyone else does. (I also think evolution is an obvious fact of biology, and while I know there are others who disagree, I would like to hope that I wouldn’t have to vote for such people for president.)

I can also remember when the Republican Party was the party of common sense. At least, they had more common sense than the Democrats.

And while I don’t know whether Rick Santorum is in the lead to become the GOP nominee, I’m wondering how well his views on birth control are setting with the general public.

Jennifer Rubin is a conservative (at least, she was back in the old days before Ann Coulter was accused of liberal treason), and she finds the situation “mind-numbing“:

The impression that Santorum finds the prevalent practice of birth control “harmful to women” is, frankly, mind-numbing. If he meant to focus on teen sexual promiscuity, he surely could have, and thereby might have sounded less out of touch.

Now, he qualifies his religious views by saying he doesn’t vote against contraception “because it’s not the taking of a human life” (in other contexts he has emphasized that as a legal matter he has no problem with contraception). But how does that square with his professed belief that a candidate’s values are essential to understanding and predicting his behavior? Perhaps that’s an abortion-only rule. (And really, where are George Stephanopoulos’s questions on this topic when you need them?)

In any event, this sort of thing undermines Santorum’s electability argument. (Current polling match-ups between President Obama and each of the two frontrunners, before the GOP has a nominee and before Santorum’s record is out there, are virtually useless.) This is how, in part, he lost Pennsylvania — by appearing extreme and schoolmarmish, too far to the right of average voters in a purple state. If he is the nominee in 2012, he might get some blue-collar fellows, but what about those women in Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.? And what about more secularized suburban communities? Fuggedaboutit.

Women vote, but to say that this is about women misses the point.

The GOP is lucky the election is still 9 months away, because right now this loony tune shit is helping Obama, big time. Worse yet, it’s even helping Obamacare!

It’s not even close: By a lopsided margin of 66 percent to 26 percent, Americans support President Barack Obama’s proposal to require private health insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control for women, according to a new CBS/New York Times public opinion poll.

Rephrasing the question to ask specifically about “religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university,” barely moved the needle, to 61 percent to 31 percent.

Those numbers, which come with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, are better for Obama than his numbers on foreign policy (50 percent approve, 36 percent disapprove), Afghanistan in particular (51 percent approve, 36 percent disapprove) and are nearly the mirror image of public opinion on his handling of the federal budget deficit, where he loses 32 percent to 59 percent.

What a wonderful red herring. A majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare, yet if that all-encompassing monster can be reduced to a debate over “birth control,” they are easy to hoodwink. And by deliberately making it look to them as if he’s “attacking religion,” Obama is manipulating the red-meat conservatives into doing the heavy lifting for him.

It’s working. He’s at 50% approval now, and he hasn’t been there for some time.

Great if you want Obama to win and the GOP to lose.

But OTOH, if winning isn’t the goal, then carry on.