Poor Julia: liberals and conservatives wrangle over the life of a fictional character

The campaign season is officially––finally––underway, and I for one am preparing for the canned barbs, moments of honesty we call "gaffes," and pissy little Facebook arguments the way I would for the fiftieth installment of the American Pie franchise. There's really only one issue worth talking about this election, and that's the economy. And even though the job market has begun to heal after years of stagnation, the most recent employment numbers suggest that the road to recovery may still be long.

Nevertheless, I'm a bit disappointed that the economy is the marquee issue. Surely the president's job is more expansive than the shepherding of economists and businessmen.

Barack Obama's campaign team seems to think so. One of its propaganda tools is The Life of Julia, a story about a woman whose life is enriched by Barack Obama's health care, economic, and education reforms. "Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarden ready to learn and succeed," the first slide reads. Like most propaganda, it's short on facts and long on meaningless platitudes.

Hidden beneath the surface of this otherwise Dick-and-Jane-ish tale is the implication that this election, more so than many before it, has long-term consequences. George Bush's eight years in office were defined early on by terrorist attacks and the two wars they spawned, and the political conversation has been a reaction to the Republican party line ever since. This election will decide if Barack Obama was an experiment or a reflection of dissatisfaction with the increasingly erratic and fractured conservative ideology.

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have responded by turning––as they are wont to do––towards the strategies that worked in the past. They've united under the anti-Obama banner, and wheeled out the key terms that make up their ideology: Everything Barack Obama does hurts you in the pocketbook and offends your personal dignity.

Enter A Better Life for Julia, in which our heroine's life, as envisioned by Obama's campaign staff, is turned on its head. Obamacare is an insult to her financial and religious freedom. The president's policies have laden her with debt, and her family's wellbeing is hampered by a sputtering health care system, inadequate (but somehow overfunded) schools, and exorbitantly high taxes.

Never mind that, in this alternate universe, the president is somehow to blame for using the same tools a Republican would have used in the same position. And take care to overlook the Heritage Foundation citing itself in its own propaganda. Oh, and forget that Obamacare is modeled after the health care reform program Mitt Romney put into place in Massachusetts. All you have to know is, Obama wants to make the government so big, and the economy so small, that smart, conscientious people like you will be crushed under the weight of the common interest.

This is an election with consequences, and the fate of America can't be trusted in the hands of the man who brought you the corpse of Osama bin Laden, military drawdown, a slowly-but-surely recovering economy, and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.