Melinda Henneberger's column is such a target-rich environment that there's just too much there for one post...so here are a few more random thoughts on it:
- Various folks have pointed out that her timing is off in a half dozen ways. Just to illustrate how far off it is, here's a poll from earlier this month finding that "Abortion is not a top-tier issue among either Democratic or Republican voters." (Scroll down for the key issues results.) But of course abortion is really the key to everything, because she supposedly talked to women who supposedly said so.
- In a previous choice-is-killing-the-Democrats column (this one from 2004), Henneberger applauds the (right-wing) 'values' voters:
I find it wonderful that there are Tom Amplemans out there for whom voting is not only an economic calculation—a what’s-in-it-for-me? decision—but a moral exercise, a matter of trying to do the right thing.
But of course what she's doing in her New York Times column is arguing that the Democrats should abandon a moral position (choice) for the sake of political expediency. In other words, my moral values have to be respected and yours have to be sacrificed to politics. - Henneberger is probably partly right about the impact of abortion in the 2004 election; Kerry did lose a lot of the Catholic vote (compared to Gore), and abortion was almost certainly the reason. Kerry lost those votes not because his stand or the party's had changed at all since 2000, but because certain reactionaries in the church made a point of attacking Democrats on the issue. If Henneberger really wants to help the Democrats, she could always try condemning partisan hacks like Archbishop Chaput instead of defending them. Just a thought.
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