Essay: Abortion—Biden’s ‘Eagleton Moment’

“It’s troubling that [former Vice-President Joe] Biden should so easily abandon what, until the other day, seemed a deeply held position. It is also troubling that a major element of the Democratic Party is so intolerant of an opposing idea that it would doom a candidacy on that basis alone. This lockstep abortion platform seeks to impose a simplistic position on a morally vexing issue and is reminiscent of 1992, when at the Democratic National Convention the party denied a pro-life Democrat, Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a speaking slot.”—Richard Cohen, “Joe Biden’s Flip-Flop on Abortion Reeks of Insincerity,” The Washington Post, June 10, 2019

Last week’s Presidential debates were enough to make John Kasich, speaking yesterday morning at Chautauqua Institution, issue a warning: “The Democrats have moved so far to the left that they’re going to re-elect Trump if they’re not careful.”

Part of me couldn’t help thinking that, as a lifelong Republican, the two-time Presidential candidate was not exactly a disinterested observer. But part of me couldn’t help agreeing with him, particularly when he went on to say that America was a “center-right and center-left country.” By the end of the two debates, the leftward tilt of his opponents had left little room for front-runner Joe Biden to tack back toward the middle—assuming that he does win the nomination.

You don’t have to go far to see where the new lines of orthodoxy are forming: single-payer health insurance with no role for the private sector; reparations for descendants of African-American slaves; the closing of ICE. But perhaps the greatest danger to the eventual Democratic nominee is taxpayer-funded abortions for all situations.

For the preservation of American democracy and even of world order and peace, there is nothing—nothing—so important as ridding the Oval Office of its current pestilential occupant. That’s what makes so infuriating the Democratic left’s insistence on repealing the Hyde Amendment barring federal funding for abortion except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape—and Biden’s abject surrender to that demand only a day after re-asserting his four-decade support of it.

There is a reason for the endurance of this legislation (named for the late Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde) since its enactment in 1976: It’s the closest legislative attempt to take into account so many Americans' ambivalence about abortion. That uncertainty also explains, for instance, why, though sentiment for same-sex marriage has moved decisively in a favorable direction in far less time, this country remains as fundamentally divided about abortion as it was when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973.

But, whether a product of the Left’s fury at anything associated even peripherally with Donald Trump, punitive new restrictions in states like Alabama, or Biden’s willingness to stretch too far for the Presidential prize that has long eluded him, the narrowed debate among Democrats this past week on this issue consigns what should be a searching discussion of moral ambiguity to a simple bumper sticker: “choice.”

Remarkably, their patent political foolishness matches their moral myopia.

Already, Trump is trotting out a line that will undoubtedly join his jabs about “socialism” a year from now: “Virtually every top Democrat also now supports taxpayer-funded abortion right up to the moment of birth,” he said at his campaign kickoff rally in Orlando two weeks ago.

For any other candidate other than the insult-spewing, managerial disaster in the Oval Office, this would have been the electoral equivalent of a haymaker. It may still be enough to make thousands of former or on-the-fence voters think twice about electing any Democrat.

Just when they can’t afford to lose the vote of any Republicans or independents disgruntled by Trump’s misconduct but sympathetic to some of his policies, the Democratic left has angered and alienated them.

Nice going, people.

I don’t think that terms like “liberal” or “progressive” apply to this group. The one that does is “Jacobin,” named for the extreme radicals who, before they were done, took the French Revolution beyond its initial aims of “liberty, equality, fraternity” to intolerance of other viewpoints, the Reign of Terror—and a reaction that saw a new strongman, Napoleon Bonaparte, rise from the chaos.

And so now, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island and Nevada have liberalized their abortion laws. Increasingly, there are no limits allowed to discourage partial-birth abortion, abortion on the basis of a preferred gender for a child—or, astoundingly for a party that has long championed greater regulation in all sectors of the economy to ensure safety, decriminalizing, in Nevada, supplying abortion-inducing pills without the advice of a doctor.

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson has rightly pointed out the fateful step taken by the Jacobin Democrats: not merely permitting abortion under the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade guidelines, but actively promoting it.

It might be easy for the Left to dismiss this criticism by Gerson, a religious conservative who served as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. But it’s harder to ignore when the same argument is made by two liberals, Gerson’s Post colleague Cohen or PBS pundit Mark Shields, who correctly identify the multiple problems in Biden’s quick-as-a-blink capitulation to the absolutist wing of his party:

*If Biden had to change his position, he had plenty of time to do so before now. All the way down to his formal entrance into the primaries this year, Biden could have adjusted the position on abortion that he first staked out in his 2007 campaign memoir, Promises to Keep: “I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than 30 years. I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion, but I will also vote against a constitutional amendment that strips a woman of her right to make her own choice.”  By waiting till he was called out on the campaign trail, he furthered the decades-long impression that he is an inept Presidential candidate who can’t survive the primaries.

*Biden did not have to see himself cornered as the sole Democratic candidate who had voted for the Hyde Amendment. In fact, every single Democrat now running for the Presidency has cast a vote for the various spending bills that have included the amendment, according to this report by Carter Sherman of Vice. To be sure, they have said they have not voted for that specifically, but merely to maintain the mechanism to keep the government running. But the overall impact is about the same as those on Capitol Hill who said they opposed the Vietnam War but kept funding it.

*It will be far easier for Trump to cast Biden as an ideological weathervane. Think John Kerry looked bad after those windsurfing commercials in the 2004 election? Think what the President can do all by himself to Biden, without any TV ads. If he hasn’t cast about for a suitable nickname to match, rest assured it’s coming soon.

*The party that prides itself on “diversity” means that in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, not ideology. This weekend, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took many of the paper’s readers—and, more widely speaking, college student activists—for demonizing conservatives and evangelicals. “Too often, we liberals embrace people who don’t look like us, but only if they think like us,” he pointed out.

Over the last couple of years, centrist voters—of both Democratic and Republican stripes—have been searching for a “Sister Souljah” moment, similar to Bill Clinton’s 1992 primary season repudiation of an extremist member of an otherwise traditional and loyal element of his party.

Instead, this past month centrists got Biden’s “Eagleton moment”—a sudden, undignified abandonment of what had seemed like absolute support for a person or position. That reference might mean little or nothing to the under-30s voters that Democrats keep touting as the electoral wave of the future, but it will strike a chord among the Baby Boomers who gave Trump his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

They will remember how George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee for President, said, after the news broke of Thomas Eagleton’s electroshock therapy for treating depression, that he would back his running mate “1000 percent”; that he went back on his word just a couple of days later; and that an electorate already regarding McGovern quizzically now saw him as a weak, incompetent mess.

Biden’s abrupt about-face holds the potential for similar damage to Biden. It could even come from the left: On occasion, Garry Trudeau has neatly summed up the essence of certain politicos with an object rather than a face: a lit bomb for Newt Gingrich (referencing his destructive impact), a waffle for Bill Clinton (for his ideological dexterity). If he ever gets around to treating Biden in the same fashion, the object could be a humble piece of beach footwear: a flip-flop.

The split-the-difference posture that Biden jettisoned after a landslide of pressure was the party’s last nod in the direction of abortion being “safe, legal but rare”—Clinton’s rhetorically shrewd gesture to the uneasiness so many Americans feel about the procedure. You can take it to the bank that the last adjective goes by the wayside through the easier access desired by the Jacobin Democrats—and enacted into law in places like New York and Illinois.

Among the worst offenders is New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She didn’t make much of an impression in the debates, but she represents a useful barometer of the worrisome new direction of her party as it relates to abortion: the equation of qualms about abortion to anti-Semitism and homophobia.

 “Imagine saying that it’s OK to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic,” she said in a Des Moines Register interview a couple of weeks ago. “Asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America ... I don’t think those are political issues anymore.”

“All these efforts by President Trump and other ultra-radical conservative judges and justices to impose their faith on Americans is contrary to our Constitution, and that’s what this is,” she continued, adding: “There is no moral equivalency when you come to racism. And I do not believe that there is a moral equivalency when it comes to changing laws that deny women reproductive freedom.”

By this newly heightened rhetoric, the Jacobin left is not just imposing a litmus test but also a religious one. They effectively foreclose any appointment of a Catholic, for instance, who, in all other particulars about racial and economic justice and foreign policy, sides with the party, except for abortion.

The Democratic hierarchy has been struggling mightily to bring back to the fold voters in the Rust Belt who left the party in 2016. Do they really think Biden’s change will lure them back now, given the high proportion of Catholic voters in those states?

Once more, the Jacobin wing of the party has changed the conversation from the economic issues that are winners to the social ones that have kept them out of the White House these past 2½ years. They have just made the obstacles to winning it back that much harder to clear.

A Democratic path to victory will be assured as much by softening GOP support as by turning out their own hardcore supporters, but you’d better believe it will be far closer than the pollsters and pundits are forecasting now. Remember: not only did few foresee a Trump victory, but a number even foresaw a punishing landslide against the GOP.

In November 2020, in the not-unlikely event of another Trump victory, the Jacobin left would be well-advised to stop casting around for forces to blame, domestic or foreign, but instead take a long, hard look in their own mirrors. In their game of idiot’s delight, they’re already doing everything they can to hand re-election to Trump—and nowhere with as much moral obtuseness as in the abortion issue.

Quote of the Day (Gail Collins on John Edwards, ‘Deep As a Melted Ice Cube’)

“There was a time when many of the great minds in the Democratic Party thought John Edwards would be the perfect presidential nominee. He was cute and from the South, and the son of a millworker, and he talked about poor people and had lots of position papers.

“Unfortunately, he was about as deep as a melted ice cube.”—Gail Collins, “Mr. Edwards and the Shrimp,” The New York Times, June 2, 2012

This post will not consider John Edwards’ worth as a husband, father or human being, nor what “God’s plans” might be now that the former U.S. Senator from North Carolina has (at least temporarily) escaped the pokey in the wake of his acquittal on campaign-finance charges. It’s not merely because I considered some of these matters before and see no reason to revisit them, but also because, when you get right down to it, the blogosphere has come to a consensus on all of this surpassing any Presidential landslide I know of.

Nor will I consider the legal niceties that allowed him to walk. If you want to know why, after weeks of testimony and all kinds of documentation, enough jurors thought that “the evidence just wasn’t there” to convict, just ask members of Congress (most of whom are attorneys, like Edwards himself) how they  pass legislation that looked simple enough to garner complimentary headlines (e.g., CAMPAIGN-FINANCE REFORM PASSED), but impossible for jurors to make head or tail of.

But there’s another aspect of the case hardly considered in the din of recent headlines, a matter that Ms. Collins opened up for discussion inadvertently: the media enabling of a Southern-fried narcissist in an empty suit and a $400 haircut.

I’m a faithful reader of Ms. Collins, but nowhere do I recall what she related in her most recent column: a conversation with Edwards on his support of South Carolina shrimpers who wanted to ban the import of South Vietnamese fish. That longstanding omission is surprising, since the car talk between columnist and candidate quickly demonstrated that Edwards was the human equivalent of Gertrude Stein's definition of Oakland: i.e., “there is no there there.” Other Times readers who actually went to the trouble to check the paper’s online archives likewise found no such mention of this conversation before now.

At the same time, virtually every reader of Collins over the past few years knows that she has repeatedly (more than 60 times, as of three weeks ago) observed that on a family vacation some years ago, Mitt Romney placed the family dog Seamus on the car roof.

Nor was Collins the only member of the media to observe that Edwards was intellectually incurious and out of his depth. Two and a half years ago, after the Senator acknowledged, following months of denials, that he had indeed fathered a child through former campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen admitted he had put aside doubts about Edwards’public-policy acumen, concerns that came from the most reliable sources: namely, the candidate’s Senate colleagues and his own conversations with Cohen.

Let’s consider the nature of these discoveries for a second. They came not to unknown hoaxers phoning to ask the candidate’s position on a country about which he knew nothing (as when staffers from Spy Magazine called Capitol Hill offices in 1993 to inquire about congressmen’s stances on Freedonia, the mythical nation sent up in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup). No, these were widely read, veteran columnists at the two U.S. newspapers most responsible for the ongoing media conversation, the Times and the Post--writers with the same worldview as Edwards and, therefore, not inclined toward skepticism or "gotcha" moments.

Most of all, the superficial, clichéd, uninformed responses came concerning the issue on which Edwards based his Presidential campaign: inequality. If Edwards couldn’t have been bothered to find the facts about something that mattered to him, how would he have fared in the Oval Office on matters about which he cared little?

What does it say about the Newspaper of Record that it could offer only the most shallow analysis of why Mitt Romney arrived at his position on the debt (i.e., a large portion of it derived from his Mormon faith), but it could say nothing about a shallow former U.S. Senator, Vice-Presidential candidate, Presidential aspirant, and Attorney-General wanna-be?

I'm not a Tea Partier who screams about unfair treatment of GOP candidates deemed stupid. (As far as I'm concerned, if Dan Quayle were a TV series, it would be "F Troop.") But I'm afraid Ms. Collins needs to explain more convincingly why she never conveyed her concerns about Edwards' lack of gravitas till now. Unfortunately, any such explanation would have to allow that her acceptance of the candidate's views predisposed her against examining his record more critically. 


This week's cover story for the New York Observer, on the tensions created at the New York Times under publisher/CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr., quotes executive editor Jill Abramson congratulating the staff for its coverage of President Obama’s support of gay marriage, noting that it was an example of “how deeply we have grown as a newsroom and how much more all of you are doing, as we create new and richer layers of journalism.”

Lack of vetting for a candidate as vacuous as Edwards, however, is hardly a point of pride. In fact, it should be as much a matter of soul-searching as Judith Miller's erroneous reports about Iraq's nonexistent nuclear program on the eve of the war. After all, the last election induced much hand-wringing about the dangers of an attractive, charismatic candidate who also happened to be inexperienced, incurious and lazy--and a heartbeat away from becoming President.The press, led by the Times, patted itself on the back for pointing out Sarah Palin's flaws. The press--very much including The Times--will earn more of the country's respect when it scrutinizes such a candidate who happens to be a male Democratic liberal as it will for examining a female Republican conservative.

Quote of the Day (Richard Cohen, Likening Romney to ‘Archie’s’ Reggie)

"Mitt Romney is starting to get on my nerves. He reminds me of Reggie, the rich, handsome, athletic and effortlessly superficial character in the “Archie” comics. He does almost everything well, and he looks like a million bucks (leveraged for much more), but he rings hollow, like the class president who would bring glee to all of Riverdale High by slipping on a banana peel. I’d kill for that.”—Richard Cohen, “Romney’s Aw-Shucks Rhetoric Rings False,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2012

Ridiculous Headline of the Day (Investor’s Business Daily, Alarmed About Obamacare)

“SOCIALISM CREEPS IN AS AMERICA SLEEPS”—editorial headline in Investor’s Business Daily, December 22, 2009

Puh-leez. “Creeping socialism”—can’t the opponents of universal health care come up with something other than a cliché to describe their opposition to a bill that, even now, on the brink of passage, is heavily compromised and scarcely resembling what was originally advertised?

(Oh, and why does socialism always creep? Why can’t it gallop? Or at least make the phrase alliterative, Spiro Agnew-style, and say that it slithers?)

Few Capitol Hill participants in the health care debate have crowned themselves with glory, but throughout this entire process the GOP, to its shame, has been a uniquely obstructionist force. All it can do is stand there and mouth scare words or phrases, such as “Socialism.”

Go ahead—name me one concrete proposal the Republican Party has made this year toward extending coverage to the desperately uninsured. You can’t, can you?

That’s because the party hopes, with its hopeless intransigence this time around, to do what it did in 1994 against Bill Clinton: use a legislative debacle to jump back into the political game following an election where they lost the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This electoral revanchism is all part of what The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls “The Rise of Republican Nihilism.”

I write this sadly, as someone who believes that neither party has a monopoly on anything close to the truth, and that the two-party system is a necessity for keeping assorted rascals from running completely unchecked. Nevertheless: The Republicans are playing a dangerous game—increasing the cynicism of ordinary Americans, even while further endangering (as if they hadn’t done enough in this direction under the prior administration) the economic security of everyone.

Let there be no mistake: in our extreme medical insurance environment, affordable health care has not become so much an economic issue but a moral right. Yet the GOP has decided to get on the wrong side of history, unlike 1964, when enough of its members joined with Democratic liberals to enact landmark civil-rights legislation.

Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is supposed to be written by journalists, who are supposed to be trained to avoid clichés. But keep enough company with multiple members of a certain type and you become infected with groupthink.

So now the editorial writers at IBD are parroting a business and right-wing party line dating back more than a century. A sidebar to Chait’s article, “Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse,” lists some choice examples of such ostrich-like rhetoric.

Here’s my favorite, from a figure who remains an inexplicable conservative darling, Ronald Reagan, carrying a 1961 attack on Medicare to what can only be termed the realms of sci-fi fantasy:

“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”

What???!!!!

To be sure, significant problems exist in the current health-care legislation. And Mitch McConnell and Co. have a point: a nearly 2,000-page bill, rushed through committee, with only a handful of senators and White House aides understanding the fine points, is not a well-thought-out package.

But they’d sound a wee bit more credible if they’d subjected the similarly prodigious, rushed-through Patriot Act to the same level of scrutiny.

It’s not enough to be against something; you have to say what you’re for. If the GOP wants to be trusted with the responsibility of governing again, they need to step up and explain their positions. On health care, they haven’t, they won’t, and they deserve to pay the price at the polls for their willfulness.

To understand what’s at stake as Congress approaches its moment of truth, consider the following searing piece from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, inspired by an anguished visit to a loved one at the hospital, and especially this passage:

“This is the only economically advanced nation where people can go bankrupt from medical bills. This is the only rich nation where people can die from lack of medical care—because they can’t afford it or because it’s not available."

At Christmas, the mind turns inevitably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchit’s family in that holiday tale represented the kind of people—living on the knife-edge between survival and grief—who are becoming more and more prevalent today.

In Dickens’ time, the Cratchits (in Scrooge’s midnight nightmare) would have fallen into their personal abyss simply because not enough people recognized the consequences of massive, impersonal economic forces, such as the schools, the workhouses, the jails, and the courts.

Where is the contemporary novelist who would do to the U.S. health care system what Dickens did to Victorian Britain’s legal system in Bleak House—i.e., capture the beast in all its Brobdingnagian, soul-crushing complexity?

Well, below—again, from Cohen—is a good place to start:

“Behold the uninsured. Look at them in their terror. See their faces as they are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or their look of despair because they cannot afford any insurance at all. Watch them ignore symptoms of sickness, pass up examinations or wait, often for hours and hours, for free medical services.”

I would love to see what Dickens would have done with the pundits and politicians who scream about “creeping socialism.” They’re a novelist’s—even a caricaturist’s—dream.