The most recent trouble arrived last Sunday in the person of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who went fantastically off message when he said his fellow Democrats’ attacks on Mitt Romney’s background in private equity are “nauseating.” The Obama for America hazardous waste disposal team leapt into action, forcing Booker to record a hostage-video-like recantation of his comments by the end of the day. It was too late, though. Booker had tested the waters of intra-Democrat dissent and had found they were warm. Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Steve Rattner, Ed Rendell, Artur Davis, Harold Ford Jr., Mark Warner, and Joe Manchin all followed him in.

What Obama intended as an attack on the business practices of Bain Capital transmogrified into a debate over the fairness of that attack. The press hates hypocrites, and it did not take much digging to report that Obama raised more from private equity in the 2008 cycle than any other candidate, and that the president’s negative ad buy went up on the very day he held a $35,800 per plate fundraised in New York City with the president of private equity firm Blackstone.

Not even MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell could reconcile the war on Bain with the fact that Obama has taken more than $200,000 from the likes of Bain Capital managing Director Jonathan Lavine, not to mention tens of thousands from Landmark Partners Chairman Francisco Borges. The man would not even be president without the longstanding support of Chicago’s Pritzker family, which knows something about, in the words of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.), “raping companies and leaving them in debt.”

The hypocrisy runs to the staffing decisions Obama makes. His White House is stuffed with Wall Street types. Two corporate buyout specialists sit on the president’s job council. All three of his chiefs of staff have worked for financial houses. His small business administrator worked in private equity. His former chief technology officer left to join a private equity firm. His former communications director Anita Dunn left the White House and promptly offered her services to protect the private equity executives she had attacked while in government. And yet the president is happy to run unseemly ads arguing private equity firms are job-destroying “vampires” that “suck the life” out of other companies and profit from their demise. Indeed, he informed the country Monday that Romney’s private sector career “is what this campaign is going to be about.”

Really? Obama may spend close to a billion dollars demonizing Bain, only to find that when the national exit poll comes out the night of November 6, “private equity” will not rank at the top of the public’s priorities. There is also a larger danger with shifting the focus of the campaign to such ancillary topics as whether private equity is good or bad: When you run a tactical campaign that targets the news cycle, you run the risk of having the attacks backfire. That is exactly what happened in the case of Booker, and what has happened in other cases as well.

In February, the president’s Chicago team jettisoned the political identity Obama had been building for years. He had already turned off independents by outsourcing legislation to the left-liberals in Congress in 2009, ignoring the bright flashing neon DANGER sign that was Scott Brown’s victory in 2010, and waiting until the last minute to release an economic plan that had no chance of passing in 2011. But it was not until the New York Times reported that Obama had reversed his position on raising money for the Super PACs he had once called a “threat to our democracy” that the bloom truly came off the New Politics rose.

This purported reformer was a classic politician who broke promises and compromised ideals in a relentless quest for cash. Lacking a popular record of accomplishment, and having betrayed his reputation for youthful, sunny, bipartisan Hope and Change, Obama had no other choice but to run a negative campaign in which he tried to paint the alternative candidate as too frightening to govern. So here we are.

The “war on women” message was conceived as a way to frighten all the single ladies into turning out for Obama in the fall. But that narrative quickly collapsed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen appeared on CNN in April and proclaimed that Ann Romney had not worked “a day in her life,” a remarkably stupid attack on stay-at-home mothers that Obama Super PAC donor Bill Maher “explained” by saying, “What she meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work.”

America was thus treated to the spectacle of the president, his wife, and the vice president all defending Ann Romney’s honor, and of the White House press secretary pretending that he did not know the well connected Democratic player who had stepped on the campaign’s message. Making matters worse, the Free Beacon revealed that both the White House and Senate Democrats pay female staffers less than male ones.

Joe Biden’s May 6 appearance on Meet the Press turned into a similar disaster when the vice president said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. That put Biden at odds with his boss, who at that time opposed “men marrying men, women marrying women.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan sided with Biden the next morning. Soon the media wanted to know whether Obama agreed with his subordinates. It was a treat to watch the condescending and preening White House press secretary being pummeled for 21 minutes with questions he could not answer because his bosses at the White House and at the campaign hadn’t the faintest clue of what to do.

Here, too, money was the foremost concern. Major fundraisers in the LGBT community were threatening to withhold cash if Obama did not endorse gay marriage. Jay Carney could not dodge press inquiries forever. ABC correspondent Robin Roberts was rushed from New York to D.C., where the president informed her that Sasha and Malia had helped him evolve into a supporter of same-sex marriage. The timing could not have been worse. The interview aired the day after North Carolina, which had been a swing state and where the Democrats will hold their convention in September, banned gay marriage and civil unions with 61 percent of the vote. Team Obama, however, managed to tell reporters—somehow while keeping a straight face—that they had been planning such a shift all along. The public doesn’t buy it.

Democrats may be able to forget Obama’s campaign finance hypocrisy. They may laugh off the Rosen and Biden gaffes. But Cory Booker’s remarks will haunt them, because in just a few sentences, the mayor exposed a growing rift in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats clawed their way back to the presidency in 1992 thanks to a revolution in Democratic affairs: No longer would his party be captured by its client groups, Bill Clinton promised. The Democrats would not merely be a tool of the unions and the New Class of “helping professions” that rely on government spending for sustenance. Democrats would be pro-business, pro-Wall Street even. Freed from a Democratic Congress after the 1994 elections, Clinton was able to make good on this pledge and restrain spending, reform welfare, cut capital gains taxes, and enjoy an economic boom. His party grew close to Wall Street. It accumulated so much goodwill there and in boardrooms across the country that in 2008 even a former community organizer with roots in the left was able to pull the wool over the eyes of some of America’s most powerful financiers.

What resulted—the stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the relentless pursuit of higher taxes on wealth, the bashing of hedge funds and private equity—has turned much of high finance against the Obama administration and even the Democratic Party at large. Cory Booker was performing triage. He was trying to sustain the dying embers of a Clintonite, pro-business Democratic Party. He understood that Obama and his Keystone Kops are turning the New Democrat dream into ashes. And Booker, like other Democrats, is terrified by the answer to the following question: Who else will Obama bring down with him?

The Washington Examiner reports:

“One of Jay’s jobs is to keep track of all the Hilary Rosens,” Kimmel joked before riffing on the White House’s spin after a gaffe by a high-profile Democratic strategist.

Kimmel: “For those of you who aren’t familiar with this story … Hilary Rosen is the woman who said Ann Romney never worked a day in her life, even though Mrs. Romney raised five kids. And, of course, the administration tried to distance itself from those comments. It said she’s not an adviser to the Obama campaign—even though as we later found out her name appeared on the White House visitor log 35 times.”

Continuing to Carney’s response, Kimmel said, “So when reporters asked Jay why her name showed up 35 times—this is where it gets hilarious—he said he wasn’t sure if it was the same Hilary Rosen. He said, “I personally know three Hilary Rosens.”…

“I’d bet you $10,000 you don’t know three Hilary Rosens, but I’m not running for president,” Kimmel cracked at Carney.

At least one political observer said it was in “bad form” for Rosen to bring Kelly to an official State Dinner.

“Hilary Rosen brought 1 of her clients, Microsoft exec John Kelly, to state dinner at WH?” Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel tweeted today. “Seems like bad form.”

Politico further reports that Rosen, a lobbyist for the firm SKDKnickerbocker, is not as distant from the White House as press secretary Jay Carney has tried to imply.

“Readers will remember that Rosen and the White House aren’t so distant,” the outlet reports. “At the State Dinner in March, Rosen attended with her client John Kelly of Microsoft.”

Does anyone seriously believe that opposing abortion is the same as opposing the Nineteenth Amendment? What about the many pro-life Democrats in this country? Are they Quislings? Will Planned Parenthood pursue charges against them under the military code of justice? And on which side are those famous lovers of women Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Eliot Spitzer? “War on women,” “99 percent,” “Buffett Rule”—they are all focus-grouped catch phrases designed to stick in the ear and dominate a news cycle or two. They are the inevitable consequence of an incumbent president with no popular record and no agenda but tax hikes.

Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York may have originated the phrase in a 2011 floor speech, but it was the Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, appointed Democratic National Committee chair that spring, who kept up the attack. Based on a close reading of Wasserman Schultz’s public statements (and you think your job is tough), as well as a careful study of my favorite MSNBC contributor, Krystal Ball, the war on women is based on Republican opposition to Obamacare and efforts to restrict abortions and eliminate public funding for them, both directly and indirectly. As it happens, large majorities oppose Obamacare and support its repeal in part or in whole, and 51 percent of the country, according to the Gallup Organization, believes that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances, while 47 percent of Americans identify as pro-life and 47 percent identify as pro-choice. These are not “extremist” positions.

What the war on women really amounts to is a battle for political power between a group of pro-life, pro-religious liberty men and women and a group of men and women who want to maintain abortion on demand and the government provision of abortion, contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures as mandated under Obamacare. On one side are people such as Sarah Palin, Mitt and Ann Romney, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers; on the other side are Wasserman Schultz, Obama, Kathleen Sebelius, Hilary Rosen, and others. If this is the war on women, we should accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.

What are the origins of this war? The gender gap in American politics has persisted since the 1980 election. In 2010, however, something unusual happened: Republicans actually won the female vote, by a single point. Independent women went AWOL on the Democrats. The disappearance of the gender gap helped contribute to the GOP’s best performance since 1946.

One of the first votes the GOP House took was to repeal Obamacare. Shortly thereafter, the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider.

This terrified Democrats. Not only did they lose women in the 2010 election, the new Republican House majority was targeting a major Democratic donor with laser-guided legislation. A GOP victory in 2012, especially one based on a narrow gender gap, would endanger seriously the abortion lobby and feminist establishment in the United States and, by extension, the future of the Democratic Party.

What to do? Win women back, either affirmatively, through a booming economy and popular initiatives, or negatively, through striking fear in the hearts of women by suggesting that Republicans want to strip them of their rights. An affirmative argument was out because the economy is not booming and Obamacare is unpopular with both sexes—and possibly with the Supreme Court, as well. That left the terror tack.

Wasserman Schultz prepared the battlefield. But it was not until recently that Wasserman Schultz’s catchphrase became Democratic mantra, echoed by Democratic officials and talking heads on MSNBC and in other Democrat-friendly media outlets. Even more recently, Republicans began to fire back.

After the initial skirmish, a March Washington Post poll showed Obama faring worse among women. The president’s approval rating may have improved in some polls in recent weeks, but the rise does not coincide with any new counteroffensive by the Democrats. The war on women has already been waged for months, and the presidential race remains competitive in polls of likely voters. Indeed, the latest Fox News poll shows Obama’s approval at a low and Romney edging out Obama in a head to head matchup. As amazing as it might seem to liberals, voters neither care about nor are aware of supercilious arguments on cable news. Their behavior is driven by the actual conditions on the ground: the economy, the deficit and debt, and the Sword of Damocles that is Obamacare.

Wars ebb and flow. If the war on women was launched with Republican votes against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, the liberals struck back when Limbaugh was forced to apologize for referring to left-wing activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut.” But this week brought new developments from the front, when Mitt Romney pointed out correctly that more women than men have lost their jobs under Obama, when the Free Beacon reported that women are paid less than men in the Obama White House, and when Democratic adviser and overpaid consultant Hilary Rosen insulted stay-at-home moms across the country by saying Ann Romney has “never actually worked a day in her life.”

Within 24 hours, the Obama campaign had ordered and carried out the political equivalent of a summary execution, distancing itself from Rosen and forcing her to make a humiliating and half-hearted apology on the war’s primary battleground. It is too soon to say, however, whether Rosen’s gaffe was the war on women’s high-water mark, a turning point, or just another skirmish in a long, hard slog.

Fighting to win the White House and Senate, to overturn Obamacare, to reinstate the Mexico City policy, and to defund Planned Parenthood is, as Reagan once described another just war, a noble cause. There will be setbacks. There will be casualties. A surge of forces may be required. But there is one thing we will be able to say when we get back home, and we may thank God for it. Thirty years from now, when we are sitting around our fireside with our granddaughters on our knees, and they ask us, “What did you do in the great war on women?” We won’t have to say, “Well, I shoveled dirt on MSNBC.”

ROSEN: That’s okay.

BLITZER: How do you feel that the fellow Democrats are going after you like that?

ROSEN: I totally agree with what the first lady said about women, that’s what I’ve felt that my whole life. What she said is fine. What the rest of them said is politics. The Republicans slammed and came at this pretty quickly. People who know me, know that I didn’t intend that and my words were not very good. If they want to play politics with it, that’s fine. it doesn’t change the issues and it doesn’t change the fact that I still believe Barack Obama has the best record to run on that supports women.

Liberal strategist and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen criticized the wife of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney as someone who “has never actually worked a day in her life.” Liberals and conservatives alike were quick to denounce the comments.

Rosen initially dismissed the reaction to her comments as “faux anger” and refused to apologize, doubling down on her comments on Twitter, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She later issued a tersely worded apology to Ann Romney, in what she described as an effort to “declare peace in this phony war.”

Democratic operatives Thursday struggled to distance themselves from their fellow Democratic operative, insisting that Rosen is not affiliated with the Democratic Party.

“Hilary Rosen is absolutely not a paid adviser to the DNC or to the Obama campaign,” the committee’s executive director Patrick Gaspard said Thursday on MSNBC.

The facts suggest otherwise.

Since 2011, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has paid $120,000 to the lobbying firm SKDKnickerbocker, where Rosen works as a managing director. Records show that the money paid for the services of a “communications consultant” and a “media consultant.”

There is reason to believe that the “consultants” are Rosen and former White House communications director Anita Dunn, another SKDK employee who is embroiled in a number of political controversies.

The Wall Street Journal reported in February that “seasoned Democratic female pros” Rosen and Dunn were enlisted help DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz “tone it down.”

White House records reveal that Rosen has made at least 35 visits to the Obama White House, making her a more frequent visitor than Wasserman Schultz. She has previously worked as a staffer for a number of Democratic lawmakers including former Gov. Brendan Byrne (D., N.J.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.).

Politico noted that since graduating from George Washington University in 1981, Rosen has “never left Washington.”

Since October 2011, Rosen has been identified as a “Democratic consultant” at least 20 times during her frequent appearances on CNN.

She currently serves on the board of the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund, the partisan arm of the Center for American Progress, both of which are supportive of President Obama and the Democratic Party.

CAP Action did not return requests for comment on their board member’s attack on Romney.

Her attack is merely the most recent in a string of controversies that have plagued Rosen’s entire career as a Washington political operative.

In 2010, Rosen was ousted as editor-at-large of the liberal news website Huffington Post, after it was revealed the Rosen was lobbying on behalf of the beleaguered oil company British Petroleum following the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which many blamed on the BP’s negligence.

As chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the early 2000s, she led the contentious effort to shut down Napster, the popular file-sharing network.