Back in February 2012, after a GOP debate, AT asked the question whether moderator George Stephanopoulos was a “stalking horse,” which is someone who tests an idea for a third party to see if it works.

Back then it was birth control and abortion, coming under the bigger theme of the “War on Women”. The issue came out of nowhere and baffled the debaters. Then it came up again and again. Stephanopoulos may have been floating the idea out there for the DNC, the third party in a GOP debate.

He worked in the Clinton White House and recently he was (rightly) excluded from moderating a Republican debate. He was and is a partisan working in the news media (but I repeat myself).

It seems to me (at least) that Jake Tapper is not as partisan as Stephanopoulos is, so I can’t accuse Tapper of deliberately helping the Hillary campaign. I certainly have no evidence of it. And everything seemed so lighthearted, so relieved, at the end of the long debate that no one noticed how the issue helps the DNC and their probable nominee.

To add to my speculation, I can ask, why the sudden push to make 2016 the Year of the Woman and change an image on the currency to a woman? Why not do this, say, back in 2008 or 2009?

The push was surely getting started before Carly joined the race on May 4, 2015 (and Hillary’s troubles), and today perhaps many in the DNC believe Carly won’t get the nomination, and the odds are much better than even that she won’t, while the odds still favor Hillary.

So DNC and Jack Lew of the Treasury Department, an Obama appointee, may be coordinating this push, without our believing in a vast “left-wing conspiracy,” to tweak Hillary’s statement. Do you remember the JournoList collusion, in which hundreds of journalists emailed each other and coordinated issues and responses to Republican counter-issues and responses?

Why would Tapper assume it was a legitimate issue at this time? Just breathing in the zeitgeist? I don’t know. Those are questions, not statements.

But whatever the case, the timing sure is odd or “coincidental.”

James Arlandson has written a supernatural historical fiction about his ancestor and the seventeenth-century real founding of America: Will Clayton: Founder, Quaker, and Demon Breaker. His website is Live as Free People, which is updated almost daily.