OPINION:
Since the derision of Team Obama’s “The Life of Julia” campaign rolls on at a fast and furious pace, I figured I’d throw in my two cents. Perhaps I’m dating myself, but when I was a kid, a TV series that ran for a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s that depicted a young nurse going through the struggles of everyday life. The show was also titled “Julia.” For purposes of clarity, let me label Team Obama’s Julia as “Parasite Julia” while the Julia from the TV show will be “Nurse Julia.”
Nurse Julia, played by actress Diahann Carroll, was a widowed black woman who was forced to raise her son by herself after losing her husband in the Vietnam War. She worked long hours at the local doctor’s office and with the help of kind and caring neighbors appeared to do an admirable job of raising her child. Now perhaps my memory is a bit sketchy, but I don’t seem to remember Nurse Julia spending much time lamenting the social injustices or the lack of “fairness” that forced her into a life of such hard work.
In contrast, let’s now turn to “Parasite Julia.” Team Obama’s infantile slide show depicts a faceless individual plodding through life on the largesse of government beneficence: free to take advantage of the government’s failed Head Start program, free to procreate without the encumbrance of marriage and free to somehow spend her retirement years living on an insolvent Social Security system. (It seems Parasite Julia didn’t even feel it necessary to save for her own retirement.)
Team Obama’s not-so-subtle message is that Parasite Julia would have been unable to survive the brutality of American life without government intervention, a notion that doesn’t compare well with Nurse Julia’s successful life devoid of government handouts. We’re talking about two fictional characters, so let’s introduce a third. If Team Obama had a composite daughter, she would very likely act a lot like Parasite Julia.
DAN WILSON
Stafford, Va.
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