At the Saddleback Forum, Obama boasted, accurately, about how he’d stuck a sentence into the Democratic platform encouraging support for women who wanted to take a baby to term instead of having an abortion. Pro-life progressives hailed that sentence as a great victory and sign that he might be able to win over moderate evangelicals and Catholics with this new “third way” approach.
Then, the first abortion ads put out by the Obama campaign, didn’t mention abortion reduction.
Last week, they put out a second abortion ad, this one trying to deal with the charge that Obama supports infanticide. They had two different (not mutually exclusive) ways they could have gone: Show themselves to be abortion moderates by emphasizing abortion reduction, or show McCain to be an anti-abortion extremist by emphasizing the Republican platform. The Obama campaign chose the second path. Again, no mention of abortion reduction.
Meanwhile, I picked up a copy of the Obama campaign’s “Plan to Renew America’s Promise.” Though it mentions reducing unintended pregnancies, it dropped the sentence about helping women carry babies to term.
My uninformed theory on what’s happened:there was always a tension for them between two goals: 1) appealing to pro-choice moderate women and 2) appealing to pro-life moderate evangelicals and Catholics. They’ve now concluded:
Winning moderate evangelicals is hopeless and, it turns out, centrist Catholics just dont care all that much abortion. Given that, it makes more political sense to reach out to those pro-choice women.
Of course this obviously leaves them open to charges that they didn’t believe in abortion reduction all that much in the first place.
(Originally posted at Steve Waldman’s blog at Beliefnet.)
