Did the Contraception Wars Help Obama?

This from USAToday is worth thinking about:

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.
The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Romney's main advantage is among men 50 and older, swamping Obama 56%-38%.
Republicans' traditional strength among men "won't be good enough if we're losing women by nine points or 10 points," says Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush. "The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us … and Republicans have unfairly taken on water on this issue."

It's difficult to think of anything else that has been going on except for the contraception debacle, so the reason for the changing opinions among women under fifty most likely are caused by the things that Republican politicians have recently said about this issue and other so-called women's issues.

Will this trend continue until the elections? Who knows, given the short memory of American voters and the amount of static and screeching and bullying in the political conversations. I do sniff a bit when I think that we live in a world where Obama can pretty much sit on his hands and get more support from women, just because the Republicans are so bad on the issues.

And they are bad. It's not that they have "unfairly taken water on this issue" as the interviewed Republican strategist argues. When the whole Catholic church refusal to offer birth control to the workers of Catholic-owned corporations turned up, all famous Republicans were out there complaining about this, without bothering to give the smallest pat on the head to us ladies! Women are invisible to Republican politicians, except as the residents of the one single area where Republicans believe in greater government involvement in the lives of the citizens, more regulation and less freedom: The Fertility Sphere.