All battles for the soul begin with culture. And while the battle against Obama’s unprecedented growth of government started with the tea party victories of 2010, the cultural battle against the left didn’t truly take until 2013. The seeds were planted for this cultural battle in earnest in 2012, when Obama and his Democratic Party allies put race, sexual orientation and abortion at the core of his reelection campaign. Americans were told by the media that Obama’s competence mattered less than the fact that half the country was mean, nasty, racist and homophobic. Todd Akin’s absurd comments on conception via rape were the issue, Americans were told, not the imminent takeover of the health care system; Obama’s sudden support for same-sex marriage was the issue, not his devastating regulatory state; George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were the issue, not the destruction of entire swaths of the United States via leftist governance.
And it worked. Conservative Americans, bludgeoned into silence on cultural battles, decided to focus entirely on Obama’s economic buffoonery. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work; culture, as my friend Andrew Breitbart was fond of stating, is upstream of politics.