Dan

Calabrese

Read Dan's bio and previous columns here

August 21, 2008

The Right’s Pro-Choice Freakout: Veep’s Abortion View Irrelevant

In wombs all across America, unborn children suck their thumbs and think, “I hope the next vice president isn’t in favor of aborting me!”

OK, no they don’t. But plenty of Republican voters are apparently thinking it for them, which brings us to the latest symbolic litmus test to which John McCain is being subjected to mollify the conservative base, which still can’t quite come to grips with the fact that McCain is the Republican nominee for president.

McCain, who thinks for himself and has been known to come to conclusions with which this column disagrees, let slip in a recent interview that he would not rule out certain prospective running mates solely because they might be pro-choice on abortion.

Add this to the fact that the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani has been chosen as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention, and the base’s angst is magnified all the more.

Why all this should shock anyone is beyond me, but the base predictably went bananas anyway. Leading conservative movement types immediately took to the airwaves and to the web to lay down the law to McCain: If he picked a pro-choice running mate, the base would sit on its hands in November, and McCain would get a front row seat at the inauguration of Barack Obama.

The base is prepared to die on a curiously chosen hill.

Whoever McCain picks, that person’s position on abortion will be one of the least important things about him or her as it pertains to the prospective new administration. Yet you’d think, listening to the chatter, that dealing with abortion is all the new VP will do.

The pro-life movement has been focused for a generation on electing pro-life presidents, vice presidents, legislators and drain commissioners. None of it has changed abortion law in America. Today, demanding the nomination and election of pro-life candidates for every office under the sun is as much a password into the club as it is a serious attempt to change anything.

That’s why it’s so absurd to make it the key issue here.

First, McCain himself is pro-life, and always has been. It would be one thing if the base were to demand a supply-sider as vice president because McCain has sometimes been wobbly on tax cuts. But on abortion, McCain is in line with the base every bit as much as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Second, as I’ve argued before, the president has little impact on the number of abortions that take place in America, or on when and where abortion is legal. Even if McCain appoints the fifth justice to overturn Roe v. Wade, all that will do is send the question back to the states, where some will outlaw the practice and some will not. The ones who don’t will soon become destinations for women by the thousands who want abortions.

And once the court is tipped back to the left – as it certainly will be at some point – they’ll just invent an excuse to throw the new state laws out once again.

Abortion has taken on a bizarre role in American presidential politics. No matter who the president is, abortion law remains largely unchanged, and the only thing that stops abortions from taking place is the moral fortitude of the women in question. Although the ban on partial-birth abortion, signed by Bush, is welcome, there is no reason to believe that any U.S. president has ever stopped a single abortion.

And yet for some people, the election of a president is little more than the choice of National Abortion Decider. Every time a Supreme Court slot comes open, people talk about it as if the only thing the Supreme Court does is decide abortion cases.

The conservative base, having failed to nominate someone more to their liking such as Fred Thompson, is now being asked to stomach McCain as their standard bearer. As such, the base wants him to affirm their relevance by symbolically tipping his hat to them on the social issue that concerns conservatives most.

I don’t think that’s how McCain plays. It never has been. This is one of the reasons conservatives don’t trust him. He is often conservative, but he is certainly not part of the conservative movement, and would never qualify as one of the vaunted “true conservatives” in the eyes of the movement’s luminaries.

The base has to let this go. McCain won the nomination fair and square, and McCain is going to do things his own way. He will pick a vice president he thinks can help him govern, and whom he thinks will be prepared to take over as president if necessary. That person’s view on abortion is irrelevant to anything a McCain Administration would do to actually impact life in this country.

One of McCain’s best themes is “Country First.” Conservatives who are prepared to see Obama elected because they’re in a snit over a largely non-presidential issue might want to think about that.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # DC199. Request permission to publish here.