Look who's leaning left…
Zeke Miller reports at TIME:
GOP candidates across the country are calling for birth control pills to be available over-the-counter without a prescription, elevating a once obscure conservative proposal to reduce women’s dependence on health insurance programs. Four GOP Senate candidates have advocated for over-the-counter birth control, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Ed Gillespie in Virginia, and Mike McFadden in Minnesota. “I actually agree with the American Medical Association that we should make contraception more widely available. I think over-the-counter oral contraception should be available without prescription,” Tillis said last week in his first debate against Sen. Kay Hagan.
Liberal groups, not wanting the GOP storyline to take hold, have come back swinging, accusing Republicans of engaging in a deception to fool women. On Monday, Democratic groups in Colorado launched a five-figure television ad campaign to push back on Gardner’s embrace in a television ad last week of the policy proposal, arguing that the plan could raise out-of-pocket costs for women, since insurers who now provide no-cost contraception tend not to cover over-the-counter medication. […]
Democrats see the GOP strategy as playing right into their hand, with Republicans implicitly acknowledging that women have reason to be skeptical of their agenda. As another Democratic operative put it, “The more time that we spend talking about birth control, we’re winning.”
Bill Scher at Real Clear Politics also looks at the trend:
Several Republican candidates in the year's most competitive Senate races have begun their fall sprint to Election Day, not by embracing Tea Party-fueled conservatism but by defensively tacking leftward. […] These hardheaded Republican candidates are wisely eschewing the assumption that Greg Walden embraced, which was presuming Obama’s that low poll numbers are proof that a rightward shifting electorate is eager to vote in more Republicans.
The problem with that analysis is it ignores the Republican Party’s own poll numbers, which are demonstrably worse than Obama’s and those of the Democratic Party. GOP favorability is generally in the mid-30s. In the most recent CBS poll, Republicans scraped bottom at 29 percent, while Democrats earned a relatively healthier 41 percent.
More on the day's top stories below the fold...
Alexandra Jaffee at The Hill:
With primary season over, the GOP is beginning to inch back to the center.
Republican Senate and House candidates have begun to loudly embrace more moderate policies such as an increase in the minimum wage and over-the-counter birth control in an effort to win over swing voters and soften their image. […] the tactic is not without risk for Republicans.
Democrats have hammered Gardner as a flip-flopper on women’s issues, going so far as to label him a “liar” for coming out opposed to “personhood” measures after sponsoring a federal personhood bill. Democrats have attacked Southerland along those same lines for his proclaimed support of the Violence Against Women Act.
Speaking of a tough spot for Republicans,
Joel Dodge looks at the tough politics of Medicaid:
Princeton political scientist Sam Wang recently published an analysis of polling data from this year's gubernatorial races. It found that Republican incumbents who resisted ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion — including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, and Kansas' Sam Brownback — are in much tighter races than those who accepted it. "Republican governors who bucked their party's stance and accepted the policy are faring better with voters — in these races, an average of 8.5 percentage points better," Wang discovered. […]
[T]his is what happens when you engage with the actual policy implications of health care reform. Conservatives can whip up fear and hostility over an abstract big-government monolith called ObamaCare. But the actual programs contained therein (like expanding public health insurance for the poor) tend to be pretty appealing to voters.
As their arguments are rendered hollow, obstructionist Republicans are paying the electoral price for thwarting these types of programs. When they picked a fight against expanding Medicaid, conservatives chose the wrong bulwark for massive resistance against national health care reform.
Turning to foreign policy,
Eugene Robinson says we must keep options open with respect to ISIS:
President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State may be hard to pin down — maddeningly so, some complain — but it is likely to work far better than anything his bellicose critics advocate. […] We understand that the president will not announce the deployment of U.S. troops in large numbers and that he does not intend for the United States to re-invade and re-occupy Iraq. But we know that U.S. military advisers and Special Operations teams have already been active in both Iraq and Syria. And since Obama described the fight against the Islamic State as “similar to the kinds of counterterrorism campaigns that we’ve been engaging in consistently over the last five, six, seven years,” we can assume there will be some U.S. military presence on the ground, however covert and limited.
And
The Denver Post adds its take:
If we have learned anything from the past 13 years, surely it is that this nation cannot possibly eradicate all jihadists or their safe havens — let alone control the ebb and flow of politics in the Middle East. The president promises no ground troops, but watch for an ever-expanding contingent of advisers and military trainers to get the job done. Admittedly, it's possible Obama will identify a direct threat when he explains his policy this week. But unless he does, a full-scale commitment to defeating the Islamic State is hard to justify.
This is not a call for isolationism. As President Bush said on Sept. 20, 2001, "Americans should not expect one battle" against the enemies of Western democracy, "but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen." But that lengthy campaign must be fought prudently or it can snowball into unpleasant surprises — as Bush himself discovered in the years to come.