Fair and Unfair criticism
ArchPundit
In terms of Tammy Duckworth’s candidacy, I get the point that many are upset at Rahm’s role in the race and that’s fair game.
What I don’t get are people trying to turn an accomplished woman into a simple tool of Rahm Emanuel. Tom Roeser provides the most recent example:
Emanuel has crafted for Duckworth what he believes will be a winning issue format. While she has received a medical discharge from the service, since Emanuel took her under his wing, Duckworth has announced that she will stay in the Illinois National Guard and would be one of about a half dozen members of Congress serving in the Guard. Her life experience can be used for her trade policy: Her husband worked at two companies that outsourced jobs to other countries, prompting her to advocate a mildly protectionist stance.
Now comes what Emanuel believes is the coup de grace. She goes hard left on social policy. She is not only pro-abort but even opposes parental notification for minors seeking abortions. Opposing parental notification is a bummer in the district and represents an extreme position, but Emanuel needs to placate the district’s small but potent liberal Democratic base in order to neutralize Duckworth’s primary opponent, Christine Cegalis who sounds not unlike Democratic national chairman Howard Dean. Duckworth also supports embryonic stem cell research which, at Emanuel’s direction, she blurs into plain “stem cell” research. Bearing the imprint of her political Svengali, Duckworth talks blandly of not “substituting government for family when it comes to making personal medical decisions”-a coded reference to Terri Schiavo, another appeal to a base which hated the Schiavo intervention.
Keep it up. If she becomes the nominee a lot over voters in the 6th are going to take this sort of crap and start to see the underlying implication being made by Roeser and others that a woman couldn’t possibly be able to have her own positions so it’s all evil Rahm’s doing because he’s the big strong alpha male. That’ll work wonders with moderate suburban women.