Herman Cain has an abortion issue problem. But so does the
Republican Party.
In an interview with John
Stossel Mr. Cain gave answers which seemed
contradictory saying on the one hand that he is pro-life but on the
other hand that the decision of a woman to have an abortion if she
is raped is “her choice. Not the government’s choice.”
And more: “I don’t believe government should make that
decision.” Followed by “No, people shouldn’t be just free to
abort.”
Mr. Stossel was justifiably confused by Cain’s remarks,
but I think I understand them. Cain did not say that a woman should
be prevented from having an abortion, but simply that he
believes a woman should choose not to have an
abortion.
I don’t have the slightest doubt that Herman Cain is, in
his own personal belief system, firmly, consistently anti-abortion.
Indeed, I defy any Republican candidate in this nation’s history to
be able to match Cain’s record of having committed $1
million of his own money to a pro-life advertising
campaign. In particular, Cain funded a series of ads aimed at
getting black voters to vote for pro-life candidates rather than
blindly voting for Democrats.
But Cain’s argument on Stossel was essentially
libertarian, and it’s a position he reiterated, if clumsily and
apparently with an intuition that he might have been stepping in a
pile of political Shinola, on Piers
Morgan’s show on CNN last week: After saying that
he believes life begins at conception, when pressed about a rape
victim seeking an abortion he offered “it’s not the government’s
role or anybody else’s role to make that decision.” Further,
“whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t try to tell them
what decision to make.”
Dare I say this on pages frequented by Republicans?
Hallelujah, Brother Herman.
As heretical as this will sound to the GOP faithful,
Herman Cain’s true position, as I read the man, is perhaps the best
possible position for a candidate in an American presidential
election.
Gallup has
been polling on this issue for 35 years. With
respect to the question of whether respondents are pro-choice or
anti-abortion, there is no doubt that the trend has been slowly but
surely toward pro-life in this country… but decades of that
movement has gotten us to a country that is evenly
divided.
However, that is not the most pertinent Gallup result to
consider. They also ask a more detailed question, namely whether
respondents think abortion should be always legal, sometimes legal,
or always illegal.
The percentage of Americans (or at least of Gallup
respondents) who believe abortion should always be illegal has
never been higher than 23 percent (reached only once, in 2009), and
has generally ranged between 18 and 22 percent for the past decade.
While this number hovered closer to 15 percent in the 1990s, it was
between 17 percent and 22 percent for all but two polls between
1975 and 1991 and thus is not in the uncharted territory that
anti-abortion activists might believe or claim.
The percentage of Gallup respondents who think abortion
should be “legal under any circumstances” has been between 21
percent and 30 percent, frequently coming in at 26 percent, in
every poll for the past fifteen years. The percentage was higher in
the early 1990s, in the 30s in every poll from 1990 through 1995,
prior to which it was again between 21 and 29 percent in each poll
from 1975 to 1989. Again, today’s numbers are startlingly similar
to the numbers of three decades ago.
Those who say that abortion should be “legal only under
certain circumstances” have only twice in the history of the Gallup
series been less than the majority, and those results occurred in
1992 when the percentage who said that abortion should always be
legal reached its high point, 34 percent. Other than these two
extremely pro-choice poll results, the percentage who believe that
abortion should be legal sometimes ranged between 50 and 59 percent
in every poll but one (that one being a 61 percent result in
1997).
In short, although Americans respond that they are
pro-choice and pro-life in roughly equal proportions, there is a
large subset of both groups — but a larger subset of pro-life —
whose position is supportive of allowing abortion in certain
cases.
Considering that most Republican presidential candidates
argue that abortion should be illegal “without exceptions”, this
puts them at odds with three quarters of the American public.
Indeed, during the entire 35 years of Gallup polling on this
question, only once has the combination of those who think abortion
should be always legal and those who think it should be sometimes
legal come in at 75 percent; every other time it has been higher,
usually over 80 percent.
During the past decade, most of the increase in those who
self-identify as pro-life have come from Republicans and
Republican-leaning independent voters, with a massive 8 percent
increase in the latter group from 2007-08 to 2009-2010 (using
two-year averages).
On the other hand, the percentage of
respondents who say that abortion is morally wrong
came in at 50 percent in 2010, right in line with the
decade’s average. Those who say abortion is morally acceptable came
in at 38 percent, about one point lower than the decade’s average.
Therefore, one must wonder, as Gallup suggests, whether “the trends
by party identification suggest that increased political
polarization may be a factor in Republicans’ preference for the
‘pro-life’ label, particularly since Barack Obama took office.” The
increase in “pro-life” self-identification overstates the American
public’s opposition to abortion, and particularly the desire to
make it illegal at all times.
Putting all this together: A statistically significant 12
percent more of the American adult population believes abortion is
morally wrong than believe it is morally acceptable. Yet Americans
also believe by an enormous 3-to-1 margin that abortion should be
legal at least sometimes.
In other words, Americans, including a majority of those
who call themselves pro-life, have an essentially libertarian view
on abortion: it may be undesirable or wrong, but it is not the
government’s role to enforce what most American believe to be a
particular moral view rather than murder.
This view is how I hear Herman Cain. And, like 9-9-9 (even
though I have qualms about that particular plan) it does set Cain
apart from all the leading Republican contenders (assuming Mitt
Romney actually believes his current position).
Unfortunately for Cain — and perhaps for the nation —
the position which is likely to be the most appreciated by the
general electorate is poison in the Republican nominating
process.
Cain has been attacked by Rick Perry, Rick Santorum,
Michele Bachman, Karl Rove, and a raft of pro-life activists for
his brief dalliance with a libertarian political position melded
with a consistently conservative personal philosophy. Santorum sent
out a fund-raising please calling Cain’s position similar to those
of John Kerry, Barack Obama, and other liberals.
This is profoundly unfair to Herman Cain, not just because
he’s put a million dollars of his own money on the line to spread a
pro-life message but also because Kerry and Obama are not just
pro-choice, they’re aggressively pro-abortion including supporting
government funding.
As someone who believes himself to be in the silent
majority of Americans on this issue, which is to say uncomfortable
with the idea of abortion but more uncomfortable with government
force being used to impose a particular segment of society’s
morality on the rest of the nation, and as someone who wants to see
Barack Obama lose (by a wide margin), it pains me to see the
nominating process dominated by the “no exceptions” wing of the
pro-life movement.
I realize that one case isn’t absolute proof. But for
those pro-lifers who want to dispute my view that “no exceptions,”
along with other ultra-hard-line social issues positions, are
political losers in key “swing states,” I would point to a painful
electoral result that Colorado recently lived through.
In 2010 — a Republican tsunami election — Republican Ken
Buck held consistent polling leads over Democrat Michael Bennet in
the race for the U.S. Senate seat to which Bennet had been
appointed (when Ken Salazar went to run President Obama’s
Department of the Interior). Bennet ran a campaign portraying Buck
as “too extreme,” playing up Buck’s opposition to abortion
including in the cases of rape and incest. Then Buck said, as
Herman Cain also did in the past several days, that
homosexuality is a choice. Buck went a step
further and compared it to alcoholism. (Even if he believed that,
it was the height of political folly to have said so on Meet
the Press.) Michael Bennet, who only led one poll tracked
within the
RealClearPolitics average during the two
months before the election, ended up beating Ken Buck in a race
that nobody thought the Democrat could win — until Buck started
spouting the conservative social issues hard line.
Anti-abortion activists in Iowa and elsewhere have Herman
Cain walking back his controversial remarks on abortion. But the
real problem is not that Cain wants government to stay out of
imposing his personal moral view on others. The problem is that
Cain’s position is controversial and perhaps politically fatal
within the Republican Party politics.
If Republicans cared about winning, more of them would be
cheering on Cain’s views on abortion rather than assailing him for
them. Whether anti-abortion activists like it or not, moves to make
abortion illegal in all circumstances are unpopular in the United
States — including among many who call themselves “pro-life.”
Cain’s comments may have been politically unwise in today’s
high-tension, high-stakes environment. And those comments might —
along with other rookie mistakes — cost him a real shot at the
Republican nomination. But the same hard-line positions among
socially conservative activists which will now damage Cain’s
electoral aspirations will make it more difficult to beat Barack
Obama next November.
