‘Julia’: A life of government benefits

“Who the hell is ‘Julia,’ and why am I paying for her whole life?” asked David Harsanyi in HumanEvents.com. The Obama re-election campaign has released an Internet slide show called “The Life of Julia,” which tracks a fictional woman from preschool to retirement, showing everything that Obama’s policies would do for her and all that the “Romney/Ryan” GOP would not. At age 3, Julia enrolls in Head Start. At 18 she attends college, paid for with tax credits and a Pell Grant, and later enjoys free birth control with her employer’s health insurance. Without getting married, she decides to have a baby, and next thing we know, she retires on Social Security and Medicare. What a revealing window into the progressive worldview, said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. With no mention of family, church, or husband, Julia’s central relationship is with the nanny state. And since every benefit Julia gets is “cut-rate or free,” her “patriotic duty is limited to getting as much government help as she can.”

Someone, however, has to pay for all of Julia’s cradle-to-grave goodies, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. That’s why our national debt has ballooned in Obama’s presidency, and why, if this orgy of spending continues, our economy will be in a league with Greece’s. By the time Julia’s ready to retire, our taxes would have to go up 400 percent to pay for her various entitlements. Nonetheless, the Obama campaign fantasizes that Julia will retire in 2077 with Medicare exactly as it is today, said Alana Goodman in CommentaryMagazine.com. That’s right—no reform for half a century, even though Medicare is already bankrupting us. Does Obama really think Americans are that stupid?

Republicans can mock it all they like, but “The Life of Julia” is a very effective piece of campaign advertising, said Alexandra Jaffe in National Journal. With a pro-Obama gender gap of 10 points already, the White House has successfully baited the Republicans into fighting on the Democrats’ turf—social programs and women’s issues. Those are not topics Romney wants voters to think about. Conservative pundits may scorn Julia as a parasite, said Noah Kristula-Green in TheDailyBeast.com. But if you’ve got a daughter in college, or a mom on Social Security and Medicare, the ad gets you thinking about what would happen to them in a Republican-run country. Is the message simplistic? Of course. But that’s how an “advertisement is supposed to work.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up