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.

This Day in Electoral History (Eagleton Withdraws as McGovern VP Choice)

July 31, 1972—George McGovern would have faced an uphill battle for the Presidency in the fall in any case, but the full dimensions of his landslide loss to Richard Nixon began to become apparent when Senator Thomas Eagleton (pictured), dogged by revelations of past bouts with mental illness, stepped aside as his running mate.

Vice-Presidential selections over the past several decades have been—well, not reassuring. Dick Cheney just made headlines by stating the obvious: that Sarah Palin, though an “attractive” candidate, only had two years of experience in office, making her not the best choice for John McCain’s running mate. Of course, the ex-Veep did not comment on his ploy of eliminating all possible aspirants to become George W. Bush’s Vice-President, until the nominee, unimaginatively but inevitably, asked if he’d take the job. (See my prior post on Cheney’s clever “Hello, Dolly” strategy.)

Dan Quayle—as Alexander Pope wrote, “Why break a butterfly upon the wheel?” As for Joe Biden, he looks positively Presidential by comparison with these Republicans—and remember, this is a guy who a) has burnished his considerable reputation for running off  at the mouth in his term a heartbeat away from the Presidency, b) displayed, in his youth, great ingenuity in avoiding the draft that might take him to Vietnam, and c) saw his own early Presidential ambitions prematurely snuffed out after the revelation that he'd cribbed an entire campaign speech from British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock.

A Ken Rudin blog post for National Post Radio makes the point dramatically: Since 1964, only seven Vice-Presidential selections can be regarded as pluses; 12 rate as minuses. Now, a couple of the choices here are debatable (Cheney, inexplicably, rates a plus), but all in all it balances out. It’s not at all pretty, but it all simply reinforces a point made by Theodore H. White nearly four decades ago in The Making of the President 1972: “In the Vice Presidency lies all the potential power of the Presidency itself—yet the choice is the most perfunctory and generally the most thoughtless in the entire American political system.”

But none of these compared to the Eagleton affair. His selection was performed in haste, reconsidered under duress, terminated with extreme prejudice—all while setting back the cause of McGovern.

It had been bad enough that somehow the U.S. Senator from Missouri ended up on the ticket in the first place, calling into question McGovern’s managerial ability. But when the Democratic nominee reneged on his initial stance that he was behind Eagleton “one thousand percent,” despite the revelation that the running mate had undergone electroshock therapy three times, another impression was fostered. "The seemingly backhanded and spineless manner in which McGovern compelled Eagleton to withdraw probably hindered McGovern's shot at the presidency more than keeping Eagleton would have hurt it," writes Joshua Glasser in a new account of the imbroglio, The Eighteen-Day Running Mate.

The circumstances behind Eagleton’s selection were as fraught as any ever existing for the Vice Presidency. Start with this simple fact: before he agreed to join the ticket, hardly anyone, it seemed, wanted the job. Ted Kennedy, McGovern’s first choice, turned it down a couple of times, including only one hour before the selection was to be made. So did Walter Mondale, Gaylord Nelson, and three other politicians. McGovern and his staff were down to the wire.

What led them to such a pass? This convention combined the worst features of the Old and New Politics. The Democrats had redefined the delegate-selection rules (by a committee chaired by none other than the future nominee himself), but the party confabs hadn’t yet morphed into the intensely scripted, trouble-free snorefests we know now. Party elders had not yet taken up the task of warning pesky also-runs from mounting challenges in an event televised to nationwide audiences.

McGovern, in short, was so busy heading off a first-ballot attempt to deny him the nomination that the last thing on his mind was picking a Vice-President. 

(In fact, on the final night of the convention, delegates still were involved in enough floor fights that his acceptance speech, on the theme “Come home, America,” was delivered at such an insane hour—almost before dawn, Eastern Time—that the only people who got to watch it in prime time were those on Guam.)

The name that came up repeatedly for McGovern’s advisers at first was Kevin White, but the Boston mayor's candidacy came undone when Kennedy indicated only reluctant support. Meanwhile, Eagleton’s name had been suggested by a couple of the candidates who turned McGovern down, making him a logical second choice. 

The subsequent disaster might have occurred for the simplest of reasons: Nobody, not even the nominee, really knew Eagleton or much about his history.

In the days of the “old politics,” Eagleton’s name would have been floated among the party poobahs—regional leaders, labor bosses, longtime government officials—and they would have offered all they knew about him—some insights, surely, not helpful, but others based on insiders’ knowledge of the man. 

This was not the case in the room of 22 McGovern staffers. Only three of these people actually knew Eagleton—and the new interest groups that powered “the new politics” (feminists, African-Americans, college students) had even less experience with him. The same, amazingly, was true of McGovern himself. Despite the fact that they were similar in background (liberal anti-war politics, Midwestern roots, lifelong Democrats who had served in the Senate together for four years), the two had probably conversed at most a half hour together.

What was known about Eagleton made him seem a perfectly plausible candidate, someone with appeal to groups that McGovern needed to hold onto: Catholics, unions, voters in Midwestern swing states such as Missouri. Those qualifications—and the lack of instinctive knowledge to suggest otherwise—meant that, as the clock ticked toward making a Vice-Presidential selection, the one McGovern aide who had heard only vague rumors about Eagleton drinking heavily and experiencing mental illness, when unable to substantiate the allegations quickly, dismissed them as being without merit. 

And so, without a background check, Tom Eagleton was introduced to the Democratic delegates, and America, as McGovern’s running mate.

A 29-year-old St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Clark Hoyt, and his bureau chief, Robert Boyd, preparing a profile of the Vice-Presidential nominee, began to notice odd gaps in his history when going through morgue files at the paper—things along the lines of “Senator Eagleton has been at the Mayo Clinic for a physical exam, or Senator Eagleton has been exhausted and taking a rest, something like that,” Hoyt recalled in an interview 35 years later. When a source tipped the reporter off about Eagleton’s background—even providing the name of a physician who treated him—those inexplicable gaps began to make sense.

By this time, the McGovern campaign had also been tipped off by the source (who was fearful about what would happen once the Republicans knew about it). Eagleton, however, did not immediately fill the campaign in right away on the full details of the story—i.e., that he had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion three times and been treated with electroshock therapy on more than one occasion.

A 1997 article by former New York Times columnist Frank Rich, decrying the stigma against openly seeking psychiatric help as the “last taboo” among politicians, cites the Eagleton affair as an example of the American electorate’s blinkered approach to the subject. As so often happens, however, Rich oversimplifies a complex subject. (When he left the newspaper of record a couple of years ago, the Times’ gain became New York Magazine’s loss.) Here are some reasons why the Eagleton imbroglio was not just an example of stigmatizing the mentally ill, but deserved to be a very big deal:

·          

a   *Eagleton was not fully forthcoming with the man who would be his boss. Eagleton may have been technically correct that he never lied to McGovern or his staff, but he did not divulge the full dimensions of his treatment until the press essentially had the outlines of the story. (When asked what the Nixon campaign would find if they looked into it, he said they would only discover his exhaustion and melancholy--not mentioning his electroshock therapy.) This would not have boded well for their subsequent working relationship, had it continued. In fact, when McGovern campaign aide Frank Mankiewicz asked if he had any “skeletons in the closet,” Eagleton said he hadn’t, admitting later he had taken “a calculated risk” in not revealing all early on.  That left the McGovern campaign in a constant scrambling mode, never sure how much of what was being reported was true and how much exaggeration.

·         *Eagleton, by not being immediately candid about his past, gave the Nixon campaign what could have been a tremendous opportunity to destroy the Democrats. In a campaign already marked by dirty tricks (an aspect of Watergate I discussed in a prior post), Nixon’s operatives wouldn’t have needed much, if any, skullduggery to ferret out the truth of this situation. 

·        * Eagleton was sanguine to the point of self-deception about the nature of his illness. After the campaign, according to Theodore H. White, the senator explained to visitors that “My health just wasn’t on my mind, it wasn’t on my mind, it was like a broken leg that healed.” But, as Paul Tsongas would be about his cancer (then in remission) in 1992, he downplayed the real chance of a recurrence. He had not only been hospitalized, but hospitalized three times—once even after the conclusion of a stressful campaign. His susceptibility to another breakdown could not be explained away. Moreover, electroshock therapy, as practiced when Eagleton first received the treatment in 1961, was much more overprescribed and less regulated than it is today. The results could be devastating. (Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which occurred the same year as Eagleton’s first treatment, was precipitated by electroshock therapy that deprived him of short-term memory.)

·         *Eagleton did not make available the records of his medical treatment. It might be argued that privacy issues weighed against their release, but such is also the case with records related to the finances and physical health of candidates, and Americans have begun to look askance at candidates who are reluctant to yield such information (as Mitt Romney is learning now in his refusal to reveal more than a year or two worth of his tax records). In 1972, Eagleton was asking Americans to examine him without knowing fully how he would react under stress. In an age of nuclear peril, this was an electoral non-starter.

·         *Eagleton ignored the fact that Americans expect officials with access to national security be mentally sound. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower came a cropper because of allegations related to heavy drinking. That tendency, though it didn’t concern the Texas senator’s colleagues too much while he was in the upper legislative chamber, worried a number of them very much when he was thrust into a higher position.That heightened standard continues to govern nominations and elections to high posts in this republic.

The pressure mounted on McGovern to sack Eagleton: dozens of newspapers called for him to be dropped from the ticket, and his campaign finance personnel resigned over Eagleton’s initial retention on the ticket. Mankiewicz and Gary Hart (then McGovern's campaign manager, later a candidate in his own right) both urged that Eagleton be dropped. The senator’s replacement, Kennedy brother-in-law (and stand-in) Sargent Shriver, could not help save the sinking McGovern campaign.

Nowadays, it is fashionable to regard Americans’ attitude toward mental illness 40 years ago as benighted. Perhaps it was, but likewise, treatment of the disease had not advanced very well, either.

Americans will need to evaluate the mental health of their leaders with the same sophistication that they evaluate physical health. Clinical paranoia and delusions, for instance, are less disabling than ordinary neurosis. Moreover, what might not be disqualifying in a lower office might hold very grave consequences at the highest levels of government.

In the years since the Eagleton affair, though some politicians (notably, former Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles) have reacted to disclosures of clinical depression quickly and candidly, others (currently, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.) have, as Eagleton did, responded in a piecemeal fashion. They deserve compassion and understanding as they seek help, but the American electorate deserves from these prominent victims of mental illness candor and realism—both qualities in noticeably short supply among politicians.

Quote of the Day (George McGovern, on George W. Bush)

“I don’t have any personal malice toward Bush. I wish him well. I’ve talked to him on a number of occasions. He’s a congenial, likable guy. I’ve always admired his father, and I hope things will go well for him. I don’t think Bush is a bad man. I just think he was mistaken in so many judgments he made as president. But I wouldn’t throw a shoe at him.”—George McGovern, quoted by Justin Ewers, “Q&A: George McGovern: The Original Liberal on a ‘Second Lincoln,’” U.S. News and World Report, Special Year-End Issue, 2008

(Had I been old enough to vote in 1972, I would have cast my ballot for McGovern as President. Even given my distaste for the New Left movement that he championed and that, to a large extent, represents the shock troops of the current Democratic Party, I would still vote for him over Richard Nixon. One of the reasons is his essential decency and generosity of spirit—something he shared with onetime Presidential rival and longtime Senate colleague, Hubert H. Humphrey. That quality comes through powerfully in the above quote.

So much of the commentary from the left on Dubya has been so predictably vitriolic, without any attempt to allow for the President’s better qualities—including loyalty and the personal charm that McGovern mentions—that for a long time it was easy for middle-of-the-road/independent voters to dismiss most of their criticisms out of hand. In that respect, of luck in enemies, Bush has been, like Bill Clinton, most fortunate.

But now the day of reckoning is at hand, and I’m afraid that the saddened-but-critical tone adopted by McGovern is appropriate in judging Bush’s place in history. Bush, as our first MBA president, surely understands that the top official in an organization is accountable for results. In the case of the Presidency, that comes down overwhelmingly to the two issues that Americans use, almost invariably, as yardsticks for judging their leaders: peace and prosperity.

Even if you ascribe 9/11 to a bipartisan asleep-at-the-wheel attitude toward the rising Islamofascist menace, or if you think that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the Mideast, you cannot get around the fatal underestimation of the Iraqi insurgency and of the forces needed to quell them by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

That, coupled with incompetent planning for the post-Saddam regime (what Atlantic Monthly writer James Fallows astutely calls “Blind Into Baghdad”), made an already by-no-means-sure military occupation of Iraq into something infinitely more drawn-out and perilous.

At this point, even after the surge, prospects for a multisect democratic state in the Mideast are at best uncertain. Not a lot to show for 4,000+ American service personnel dead. And the winking at torture shamefully degraded the moral standing of the United States in the war on terror.

The economy is even worse. If you want to know the extent of the problem—aside from headlines about sagging employment, consumer confidence, or retail sales—think of it this way: What other time, since the beginning of FDR’s first term, can you recall before this past September when a run on American banks was a distinct possibility, when panic was in the air?

By neglecting the regulatory functions of government—even stripping them—Bush produced an economy like a runaway bicycle—built for speed, but unable to brake and destined to crash. Now, because of the money thrown hurriedly at banks by Treasury Secretary Paulson—not to the staggering sums that Obama will have to produce not just to restart the economy, but just to get it out of the water—the danger exists, for the first time in a generation, of inflation reignited.

There is, finally, this: Hurricane Katrina. You can argue that blundering by a Democratic mayor and governor didn’t help. But at this point, even Bush partisans have to acknowledge considerable bungling of rescue efforts by the administration. Remember this: an entire American city, New Orleans, was lost on the President’s watch. Who knows if we’ll ever see it close to its old form?

McGovern regards Obama as another Lincoln. Without the oath of office having been even administered to the President-elect, that remains to be seen, no matter how much you admire his cool or his eloquence. But there is no doubt that Bush has created the need for another Lincoln, FDR or Washington—maybe even someone with all of these men’s qualities—to cope with our tsunami of troubles.

Amid a crisis that threatened the stability of his government, Lincoln noted, “We cannot escape history.” Neither can George W. Bush. Give him points for congeniality, as McGovern does, then get out your historical yardstick. I think he’ll rate below average. And if Obama can’t rescue the economy or stabilize the Mideast, Bush runs the risk of being judged far more harshly than that, with Pierce, Buchanan and Hoover.)