Most political observers learn to take what goes on in
presidential primaries in stride, but one thing I still find
immensely depressing. Every four years, like gruesome clockwork,
Democratic hopefuls of course try to nail down liberal votes by
promising to keep abortions safe, legal, and rarely challenged.
When that fails to differentiate one pro-abortion Democrat from
all the others, they start to out-abortion each other. Readers have
heard the charges and denials and counter-charges: “I was for the
right to choose [to abort] well before my colleague was.” “I’ve
always been for the right to choose.” “Unlike my opponent, I’ve
fought hard for the right to choose.” “I performed abortions in the
Senate cloakroom.”
Only the last item is an exaggeration, as the latest dust-up in
New Hampshire shows. The technical nature of the charges obscure
the deeper conflict: Senator Hillary Clinton is alleging that Senator Barack Obama’s campaign
violated laws by using robocallers to dial up people on the state’s
do-not-call registry. It’s also possible the calls went on for a
few extra seconds than the current campaign laws allow before
identifying the messages as originating from the Obama camp.
Even if the charges are proven, it’s important to look at what
drove Senator Obama to act hastily and perhaps break the rules. He
employed those callers to quickly rebut a mailer the Clinton
campaign had sent out alleging that he was not sufficiently
pro-abortion. The calls used Wendy Frosh, a prominent spokeswoman
for Planned Parenthood, to rebut “Clinton’s last minute smears” by
assuring voters that Obama has a 100 percent pro-choice voting
record.
The calls could also have highlighted Obama’s vote as an
Illinois state senator against a law which mandated medical care
for what the AP called “aborted fetuses who survive” and the
rest of us would call babies. One imagines it would have been
utterly convincing, if in poor taste.
EARLIER IN THE campaign, there was one brief glimmer of hope for
those people who oppose abortion but would like to vote for a
Democrat for other reasons. In one debate, all of the Party’s
hopefuls were asked which Supreme Court justice they would hold up
as an example. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson mentioned
Kennedy appointee Byron “Whizzer” White.
Huge mistake. White was one of the two justices in 1973
to vote against Roe v. Wade and went to his grave
believing that Roe was an illegitimate decision.
Richardson righted himself by declaring that he had been unaware of
White’s heresy. Given that, Richardson’s new model jurist would be
pro-abortion absolutist Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In fact, in every single Democratic debate, we could be sure of
one thing. Whatever the candidates squabbled about, they agreed on
an unlimited right to kill your child-to-be. Several of them had
once voted pro-life, but they understood that if they wanted a
chance to rise to the top of their Party, that was the price they’d
have to pay, and they paid it.
Dennis Kucinich, the quirky Ohio congressman and far-left
candidate, once bragged of his consistency by claiming he was so
pro-life he wouldn’t even eat
meat. But Kucinich wanted to be a player in presidential
politics. So he turned hard on the issue, even casting a vote
against a federal partial birth abortion ban.
That vote is worth dwelling on for a second. Partial birth
abortion is a procedure the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, who otherwise went along with his Party, couldn’t abide.
He called it “too close to infanticide,” and most people, when
confronted with the reality of the procedure, tend to drop the
weasel words. After he’d read a description of a partial birth
abortion, one colleague wondered to me why pro-choicers don’t say,
“All right, we’ll give you that.”
A LOT OF GOOD it did Kucinich to throw his lot in with the abortion
lobby. He failed to break into single digit in the Iowa
caucuses; has been excluded from recent debates; and has a serious
fight on his hands, for both renomination and reelection, in
his House district. One mentions this not to kick a guy when he’s
down (his brother also recently passed away; poor guy) but to ask
Kucinich and other Democrats: Is it really worth it?
The list of Democratic politicians who used to oppose abortion
and came around is a long one — from Teddy Kennedy to Jesse
Jackson to Joe Biden to Al Gore. They flipped, by and large,
because they wanted a chance to be president.
But their chance of even getting their party’s nomination was
slim to begin with. And their position on abortion hurts them in
the general election if they make it that far. In the 2004
presidential debates, Senator John Kerry never sounded more
ghoulish then when he was defending his position on abortion, often
in the face of perfectly reasonable-sounding voters who were not
happy with their country’s regime of abortion-on-demand — at any
time, for any reason whatsoever.
Democrats try various rhetorical devices to get around this
voter discomfort. They say that abortions should be safe, legal,
and, uh, rare. Or that they are personally opposed to abortion,
but… they seek NARAL support anyway. Or that abortion is a matter
that should be between a woman, her own personal Jesus, and her
abortion doctor. Or, abortion is a matter best left up to
conscience, not law.
The final argument is darkly comic because it assumes a private
notion of “conscience” that those same politicians apply nowhere
else. In the normal back-and-forth of this year’s campaign, former
Senator John Edwards has been great at expressing outrage, and not
just with corporate America. He recently complained to the Politico that the
Clinton campaign “has no conscience.”
His charge may well be true but, who are we to judge?
