One of the most deeply gratifying features of this election
year is the apparent downfall of Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall, whose
campaign has been almost entirely oriented around his support for broad
abortion rights. Like most of the
Democratic Party, Udall is a vocal proponent of pro-choice politics, garnering
a 100% rating from the abortion rights advocacy group NARAL.
Democratic strategists believe that support for abortion rights
helped their candidate to win the 2010 Senate race in Colorado and it is
believed that GOP candidates’ controversially conservative views on abortion
costs Republicans Senate races they should have won in Missouri and Indiana. This year, however, the strategy has hit a
wall and recent polling indicates that Udall may very well lose his seat to the
more pro-life Congressman Cory Gardner, despite months of television attacks
lobbed at Gardner’s sponsorship of a federal personhood bill in Congress and his past support of a statewide Personhood law, although he has since withdrawn support for the latter. I suspect that Democrats are awfully
frustrated about this. It worked in 2010 and again in 2012, why wouldn’t it
work today?
There are at least two answers. First, Democrats have gravely overplayed
their hand, giving such unyielding attention to abortion that even the
left-leaning Denver Post felt compelled to endorse Cory Gardner, Udall’s
opponent. The Post endorsement suggested
that “Udall is trying to frighten voters rather than inspire them with a
hopeful vision. His obnoxious one-issue
campaign is an insult to those he seeks to convince.” If Udall ends up losing pundits will rightly
ask why his campaign paid inordinate attention to abortion and birth
control. Republicans will suggest that
he was a largely ineffective actor in Washington, consistently voted as a
senator with an unpopular Democratic president, and was running in a state
where the Democratic Party’s favorability has been seriously weakened by
controversial legislation passed by a Democratic legislature. With a weakened resume like that, trying to
recreate the success of other election years was the only strategy worthy of
pursuit.
But I doubt that is nearly as true as the reason that the
Udall campaign will probably give: we thought the abortion strategy really would
work. In Udall World, abortion is an
inviolable right and an incontrovertible sign of women’s equality and progress. In terms of political issues, abortion is therefore
fundamental and a kind of ideological sina qua non. That is what led national Democrats to adopt
a party platform in 2012 that supported tax-payer funding for abortion and
opposed restrictions even on gruesome partial-birth abortion or hideously
misogynstic gender-selective abortions. Last year legislative Democrats in Colorado
killed a Republican bill to ban gender-selective abortion and sponsored a bill
to make illegal any restriction on abortion or contraceptive
access. The war on women is real, it
seems, but the main provocateurs lie on the left.
In Udall World,
though, the war on women meme is not only a political strategy, but it is a
fight for social progress. So in Udall World it
is acceptable to run an ad featuring a mother pleading with Colorado voters to
elect Udall because otherwise her young daughter’s access to abortion could be
compromised. The woman was holding the
young girl in the ad. Ads like that
probably only happen in Udall World.
Most mothers--in fact, most people--do not contemplate their
daughters having abortions. This is not
only because abortion retains a kind of taboo status in contemporary American
society, and few people ever want their daughter to even be in a position of
wanting or considering having an abortion.
But it is also because deep down Americans do not like abortion at all,
no matter how pro-choice they may claim to be.
Many Americans will support abortion rights for those people, for
women and girls whose stories the Planned Parenthood campaigners love to talk
about—the women abandoned by their baby’s fathers after conception, the young
high school student, etc. But those
people are strangers, and most Americans are willing to allow them to do
what they want even if they’re doing it to unborn human life.
That is not so when it comes to their own wives and
girlfriends and daughters. The woman in
the Udall ad is not only a mother, but her daughter’s hypothetical baby is her
granddaughter, and it is especially disordered to want your daughter to be able to
legally end the life of that granddaughter. People
relate to that personally and intimately, and it disturbs them.
So this is the second reason that Mark Udall’s abortion
campaign has flopped: the campaign put far too much stock in Coloradans’ views
on abortion, believing them to be as rigidly supportive of abortion rights as
Udall himself. It was a mistake that
failed to account for the slow, subtle, and almost imperceptible pro-life shift
occurring in the country. Americans are
having to confront the reality of the humanity of unborn children, and they’re
struggling with it. Udall, on the other
hand, seems to have no qualms at all about even the most permissive abortion laws,
which makes him look craven.
Of course, the truth is that abortion is far more
black-and-white than the nuanced views of Americans. Either it is a baby or it isn’t, and if it is, then that ought to be the end of the discussion even though sadly it is not. We aren't there yet, although we are getting there. Still, few
people really believe that an unborn baby isn’t really an unborn baby,
especially when they’re confronted with the ultrasounds of their own children
and they experience the birth of grandchildren.
They know it’s a baby, which is why the Udall ad makes them bristle and
why nearly 80% of the country wants to ban abortion in the third-trimester.
There is not yet a truly pro-life majority in American and confused, nuanced views on
abortion remain. But, to the detriment
of liberal Democratic campaigns, reality is slowly trumping ideology and Udall
World looks more and more extreme to more and more people because of it.
Evidence of this can be seen in North Dakota, where abortion
is also a heated topic this year. Voters
in that state will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would
establish “The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of
development.” A recent poll gave the amendment
a 50-33 percent lead. The strongest
support comes from the youngest voters, although the sample size is so small
that not much can be gleaned from the poll alone. Passing that amendment would be
a landmark statement on behalf of life.
At the same time, a firm repudiation of Mark Udall’s cynical
abortion campaign in Colorado would be another landmark. It would be a clear statement that abortion
rights are not the sina qua non of political values for most
voters. And, together with North Dakota’s
effort to enshrine the right to life in its state constitution, it would signal
that abortion politics are changing in America.
Slowly and grindingly the country is becoming more pro-life. Though you won’t hear much about it after
November, it is nevertheless the most hopeful story of the election year.
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