Even as a composite? Might it not be fake, but accurate? Performative authenticity?

Oh... MY... GOD...

So Chuck Schumer has spent his entire career telling a story about a Long Island couple...

The only thing is... THEY DONT EXIST!!!! THEY ARENT REAL pic.twitter.com/dgmWLKvqwC

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) August 12, 2025

It's hard to think of other examples of a politician creating characters with actual names to spice up the rhetoric. I thought of John Edwards's little girl without a coat — "a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm" — but she didn't have a name. There was the name Julia, in Barack Obama's "Life of Julia," but she wasn't presented as a real person, just a cartoon everywoman.

I'm getting a "Life of Julia" vibe.

The Lees are just one example of what a family of four can save thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration's actions to lower costs.

Head to https://t.co/MeAL17UoIM to see what your family can save on child care, grocery costs, and more. pic.twitter.com/5lpc4tm4kL

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 22, 2024

 

Remember "Life of Julia"?

Meanwhile, on that new White House tweet, I'm noticing, in the responses, repetitions of "Where is Joe?" and "Who took Joe?"

The NYT mini-crossword today is all about the similarity between "Biden" and "bidet."

Is this in bad taste?

Now, that I'm staring at it, the words — all of them, taken together — seem to suggest a dossier-worthy tale about Joe Biden.

If you're wondering whether "Julia" was clued as "Fictional character in a much-mocked Obama slide-show," it wasn't. The clue was "Louis-Dreyfus of 'Veep.'"

Extra points for commenters who compose a story gliding through all 10 of those words in a lucid, tasty combination.

ADDED: My link on "Fictional character..." doesn't go to the slide-show itself but to an Atlantic article from 2012, "Obama's 'Life of Julia' Was Made to Be Mocked/It has easy-to-manipulate Web graphics, an oversimplified narrative, and hits a political hot spot: Barack Obama's new campaign tool The Life of Julia was apparently built specifically to be co-opted by right wing meme-makers." That article links (repeatedly) to the actual slide show with the URL barackobama.com/life-of-julia. But if you click on it, you get this:



The deadness of the "Life of Julia" link is something I commented on long ago, in October 2013, with "Is the old Obama campaign slideshow 'Life of Julia' anywhere to be found on the web?"

I have something I'd like to say about it, but I can't find it anywhere on the web. It's not at the link everyone linked to when everyone was talking about it, which was at the Obama campaign website. The campaign is over, so I guess there's no obligation to continue to host it, but this was an important historical document, and it shouldn't fall down the memory hole.

"The Life of Julia" has come to be cited — somewhat humorously — for the proposition that the government has lured women away from men, into a dependent relationship with the government, and this has had various ill effects. But I want to take a new look at why the graphic used a female character. Using a female screened out the reality that males rely on government programs too.

Surely, "The Life of Julia" is important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. This is the sort of thing Wikipedia is great at. But no. In fact, there's only one page in Wikipedia with both "Life of Julia" and "Obama" and "The Life of Julia"....



Campbell Brown??! Remember her?

In May 2012, Brown published a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized President Obama for sounding “paternalistic” when he speaks of women. Noting his repeated practice of describing women as “smarter than men,” she commented: “It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress.” Brown added that the women of her acquaintance “who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, ‘The Life of Julia,’ a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.” Brown outlined the lives of relatives of hers who have rescued from business failure by “Friends and family, not government.”

Hmm. That almost makes it look as though her conspicuous disparagement of "The Life of Julia" ruined her career! She was once important enough to have been impersonated by Kristen Wiig and Tracey Ullman. Couldn't find the KW one (it's not in this otherwise fantastic collection). Bit here's the TU:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth links to "Life of Julia" by putting the Obama URL into the Wayback Machine. I should have thought of that.

Is the old Obama campaign slideshow "Life of Julia" anywhere to be found on the web?

Back in May 2012, everyone was talking about that graphic depiction of the benefits of various government programs. Remember?

Barack Obama has a new composite girlfriend, and her name is Julia. Her story is told in an interactive feature titled "The Life of Julia" on the Obama campaign website. Julia, who has no face, is depicted at various ages from 3 through 67, enjoying the benefits of various Obama-backed welfare-state programs.

I have something I'd like to say about it, but I can't find it anywhere on the web. It's not at the link everyone linked to when everyone was talking about it, which was at the Obama campaign website. The campaign is over, so I guess there's no obligation to continue to host it, but this was an important historical document, and it shouldn't fall down the memory hole.

"The Life of Julia" has come to be cited — somewhat humorously — for the proposition that the government has lured women away from men, into a dependent relationship with the government, and this has had various ill effects. But I want to take a new look at why the graphic used a female character. Using a female screened out the reality that males rely on government programs too.

I'm annoyed not to be able to find the actual slideshow. (It's less annoying than the way the Obamacare website doesn't work. Is Obama ashamed of "The Life of Julia" or just unable to do internet?)

"What sexbots will do is widen the already growing chasm between the sexes, until only the fittest of the fit... can successfully leap across it to woo a human companion in the way that our genetic overlord intended."

Writes Heartiste, noting that "fitness is whatever gets one’s genes to the next generation, whether beneficial to civilization or note." I got there via Instapundit, who got there via Helen Smith, who makes the present-day observation that "20% of the alpha males [get] about 80% of the women" and says:

Those men who have more trouble getting women turn to porn and seem to ignore or be oblivious to women. I wonder how Sexbots will further change the landscape?

Here's my long-term view of that landscape. As men get absorbed into virtual-reality sex, there will be sex machines for women, replete with the elaborate stories women find titillating (including many things that are too dangerous to pursue in real life about which they currently read voraciously). The women, further relieved of motivation to form loving partnerships with men, will turn more and more to the government for support. Witness "The Life of Julia." There will be more and more of that as men depart from real life and submerge themselves more deeply in machines and women consequently feel more entitled to the government's functioning in the role from which men have escaped.

Women have the voting majority, and what will stop us from employing it in the interest of women as men demonstrate their lack of interest in us?

Will women still want to raise children? Some will, especially when it is well incentivized with government support brought about by unstoppable female voting power. We will have our choice of prime semen for artificial insemination. I'm sure the government will provide us with free services and facilitate our selection of the genetic traits we think will make the best children. Who knows what the next generations will be, as mothers produce children not because they found love from a man, but because of their ideas — possibly delusional — about what would make an excellent child? That's a new experiment. Presumably, in a world where men absent themselves from the real-world life of love and relationships, these women will choose, overwhelmingly, to have daughters. Those daughters will grow up and become part of the Electorate of Julias, further depressing any political power for men.

As this process goes on, perhaps that 20%/80% split Dr. Helen observes will be the actual ratio of men to women. But those men will not be alpha men. They won't even be beta men. And the men in the women's sex machines will be The New Alpha+++ Men. There will be no way to go back.

But this can only happen in America and whatever other free, wealthy, technologically advanced democracies there may be. So don't worry. It won't last that long.

Take the actively viral "you didn't build that" meme and cross-pollinate it with the slightly dimmed "Julia" meme and breed a vigorous new small-government/individual responsibility conservatism...

Charles Krauthammer, hammering "you didn't build it":

Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.

A similar point was made very well by rhhardin in the comments on this blog, back on July 15th, the first day we talked about "you didn't build it":

You're paid for knowing what to do.

That's just as competitive with or without bridges. You have to guess well or you fail.

Take away the reward for knowing what to do, and there's less of it happening, as we see today.

Infrastructure raises the general standard of living, but not need for guessing right. Guessing right is what the private market does, bridges or no bridges.

Government guesses wrong, and wipes out the economy entirely.

Later rh added:

A chaplin was captive in a German prisoner of war camp.

Every month or so red cross packages arrived, with cigarettes, meat, jam, and so forth.

Every month the chaplin would set off trading stuff, letting meat lovers trade cigarettes for more meat and so forth.

Every month he'd return to his bed with the equivalent of two red cross packages, a gain from trading.

Everybody he traded with is better off, and yet he comes out with a profit.

What he knows is the barter price of things, who to go to next, and so forth, to enable all the trades to happen.

Should he turn in a portion of his profit because he couldn't have done it without the red cross?

Why? Everybody is better off already owing to his efforts.

Krauthammer goes on to say that conservatives as well as liberals support infrastructure. (I note that we disagree about some infrastructure, notably high-speed rail.) The real divergence is over things like "transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners... free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work... endless government handouts...." Here, Krauthammer reminds us of the notorious "Julia" cartoon.

Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.

Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.

If the Romney campaign can take the actively viral "you didn't build that" meme and cross-pollinate it with the slightly dimmed "Julia" meme and breed a vigorous new small-government/individual responsibility conservatism...

"Julia" was the Democratic Party's "attempt to make singlehood cool and fresh and new..."

"... in an attempt to court [the single woman] demographic."

Yeah, I know: an "attempt... in an attempt" — it's sloppy writing. In the WaPo (by Jessica Gavora, but I'm linking anyway.

[Julia] is the Democrats’ answer to Romney’s family Christmas card. A nation of women on their own, after all, doesn’t relate very well to fecund portraits of smiling white moms and dads with kids and golden retrievers underfoot. With her spare, faceless affect, Julia is meant to evoke a more modern, independent sensibility — with the exception of her life of endless government dependency, that is.

Faceless! That word came up on the blog yesterday, as we talked about Obama's bullying of the schoolgirl "Coretta." He described the other children — the ones whose chanting caused him to turn on the girl – as "faceless." (They were silhouetted by the sun.)

There are 2 other appearances of the word "faceless" in "Dreams From My Father." But this is going to require a separate post. Just talk about "Julia" here. In the next post, I'm going to tell you about "Joyce."

Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you....

Julia.