Years ago, I learned to play the first few of a series of war-themed board games. They each covered distinct historical periods and wars; the farther you got in the progression, the more sophisticated the weapons and tactics became.
In one of the early games, one of the players had elephants to use as weapons. It was pretty cool. There was a catch, though. You could really only use the elephants once. The idea was you would send them into the enemy’s lines and let them those guys into a fine paste. But after your first use, the elephants would panic and indiscriminately stomp everybody, including you if your army was too close. If you didn’t want to be turned into aspic under the feet of the big beasts, you stayed back when you sent them into the enemy; you let them stomp around until they basically quit panicking and moseyed off while you kept a safe distance.
Lately, they call the people who had the elephants to begin with the Republican Party and the elephants themselves are called the Tea Party. I’ve read things that said the Tea Party was itself ginned up by Dick Armey and some other Republican big shots; given that I’ve never thought Armey – not one of North Dakota’s finest native products — was the sharpest knife in the drawer, I don’t find that hard to believe. But even if it’s not true, it’s pretty obvious that the Republican Party saw them as useful elephants and sent them charging into their foes.
The problem is, the Republicans forgot to stay back and now they’re trying to pry what’s left of the party out from between the Tea Party’s huge, heavy toes. That partially explains the crowd of clowns, cranks and idiots that have made up the GOP presidential field this cycle; any sane, intelligent candidate would have known to stay back while the elephants stomped around.
This metaphor hasn’t played out with just the Tea Party, though. The recent events that ended with Susan G. Komen For the Cure trying desperately to scrape elephant dung off its collective face is yet another example of letting the elephants run amok.
Despite the denials, it’s hard not to conclude that the whole sorry mess began when the organization hired as a vice president a woman who once ran for governor of her state on an anti-abortion platform. There are such things as coincidences, but it strains credulity to believe that Komen would do such an obviously stupid, counterproductive thing just out of the blue. Stuff happens, but oftentimes it’s set in motion.
For those of us who were thrilled to see Komen backtrack and say it wouldn’t defund Planned Parenthood – if that what it indeed said, and some are dubious about that – there was the delicious experience of watching the law of unintended consequences take a big old bite out of the group’s hide.
For one thing, it gave the lie to anti-abortion attacks claiming Planned Parenthood is an abortion mill. Something like 3 percent of its money goes to abortions; the rest goes to women’s health, including breast cancer detection programs, and it primarily serves those with no other access to such care.
What’s better, it shined a welcome light on the Komen Foundation. It’s been repeated quite often in the last week or so that something like a quarter of Komen’s budget actually goes to breast cancer research. The rest of the money goes to things like fund-raising and administration. Something like a million dollars a year goes to hassling other organizations that use “for the cure” as part of their name. And the organization also spends a fair chunk of change on getting various pink tchotchkes manufactured and marketed, the better to extend its brand.
Well, it can sell all the pink-ribbon-themed knickknacks it wants to now and it won’t undo the damage that one chowder-headed decision did to that brand.
When things like this happen, I always wonder what the group dynamics were like. You would think that someone fairly high up in the organization would have had the presence of mind to stand up and tell everybody else what a bad idea it was to mess with Planned Parenthood. While the right wing has tried for years to demonize Planned Parenthood, it hasn’t stuck; nearly every woman you talk to who’s familiar with the organization has nice things to say about it. At this point, to the vast majority of people sticking a knife into Planned Parenthood is about as popular as defending racial segregation. Right-wingers can demonize Planned Parenthood all they want, but enough people have enough experience with the group – or know somebody who has – that they recognize it does good, important work.
And when an organization like that is threatened, people who wouldn’t ordinarily do much get mobilized. Hell, I sent $50 to the local Planned Parenthood office myself last week and I can’t remember the last time I did something like that. My reaction wasn’t unusual. In fact, within the first 24 hours after Komen stepped into it, donations to Planned Parenthood skyrocketed.
Komen’s use of its financial elephants backfired about as much as it could have.
If the people who run the group are smart, they’ll get rid of the elephants in their midst. They should start with that vice president; she probably wants to “spend more time with her family,” which is the usual excuse.
But then, if the people who run that group had any brains, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. They would’ve known to stay back from the elephants if they used them at all.