Anti-Choice Senators And National Security

Ack. I was so busy making what I thought was a clever, complicated point about Chuck Schumer's recruitment of pro-life Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island that I didn't say anything about the underlying issue.

I can certainly see the case for running pro-life Democrats in, say, Oklahoma. In certain states, you're bound to get a pro-life Senator one way or the other, so it makes sense to take abortion rights off the table and try to fight for other priorities, including perhaps the other issues in the reproductive freedom package. But neither Rhode Island nor Pennsylvania actually seem to fit the bill. Pennsylvania has supported Kerry, Gore, and Clinton in all its recent presidential elections and has a pro-choice Republican Senator. It seems inconceivable that you can't find a pro-choice candidate capable of beating Rick Santorum.

Since Santorum is an almost uniquely loathsome figure in the Senate, I would imagine that people who care about choice will, in the end, rally around Bob Casey if he gets the nomination. Rhode Island, however, is another matter entirely. For the Democrats to nominate an anti-choice candidate to run against a pro-choice Republican in a blue state is asking the Democrats' pro-choice community to swallow an awfully big and awkwardly shaped pill. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see normally loyal Democrats voting for Chaffee under those circumstances. More broadly, if I may quote myself:

Certainly there are ways that John Kerry could have won the 2004 election without improving his performance on security issues, most notably by doing better than a dismal 18 percent among the 22 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that “moral values” were the most important issue in the campaign. But there’s a basic problem of logic here. Voters who think that maintaining traditional norms about gender roles and sexual behavior should be a top priority of the federal government probably ought to be voting Republican. This just isn’t what liberals believe, so people who do believe it would be acting irrationally to vote Democratic.

But Kerry’s 40 percent share among the third of the electorate citing either Iraq or terrorism as their top concern is another matter entirely. Liberals most emphatically do believe that the government should keep the population safe from foreign threats. Voters who think that this is important are voters that any self-respecting political party ought to aspire to win. And if Democrats do figure out how to win their votes, they’ll start winning presidential elections. Mere parity on the topic of national security would have won Kerry the election, rendering whatever other political problems exist with the Democrats on matters of style or substance irrelevant.

There's a strong impulse in the air to try and make gays, lesbians, and women pay the price for the Democrats' inability to come to grips with the national security issue and it's just very wrong on a whole number of levels. During the 1990s when foreign policy was off the table, Bill Clinton had no trouble running and winning on a pro-choice, mildly gay-friendly platform. What changed since then was 9/11 and the fact that all of a sudden people care more about issues of war and peace. That is what needs to be addressed. Instead, the party's near-compulsive desire to not confront these issues is pushing more and more people to throw important stuff out the window in a slapdash and cruel way.