Dueling Opinions: My Seventh Response To Jobim

A few quick thoughts, and maybe a medium-sized one:

- AJ claims that our disagreements are more than just a matter of conflicting bias. Fair enough. Then he claims that Bush's judicial apointees will influence abortion policy only in ways that are concurrent with mainstream or majority opinion. Er, sure.

- I never said that the middle 38% were the mainstream. I said that they were crucial in determining where the mainstream is. The category of people who support abortion rights in principle but also support legal restrictions is enormously broad, and it would be silly to suppose that they monolithically tilt either towards the more pro-choice position or (as AJ seems to suppose) towards a strict pro-life position. Where exactly this group fits depends on a variety of factors, of which the most important is likely the way that the question is framed. But we can look at it simply in terms of mathematical distributions. In order for a basically pro-choice position (say, starting with the assumption of abortion rights) to be the majority position, barely 1/3 (34.2%) of the middle 38% would have to tilt that way. In order for a basically pro-life position (say, assuming that abortion rights only exist in exceptional cases) to constitute the majority, more than 3/4 (76.3%) of the middle group would have to tilt in that direction. The former is not just plausible but probable; the latter is exceedingly unlikely.

-I just need to get this on the record: I never said anything about publicly-financed abortion. I referred only to accessibility and financing of emergency contraception. I realize that there are some (though I doubt AJ belongs to this group) who see everything from condom use to the morning-after pill as the moral equivalent of abortion, but that's definitely not a mainstream opinion. Mr. Bush, in one of many concessions to the religious right, routinely denies funding to institutions that offer counselling on issues of contraception and abortion.

-Re: Kerry and the FMA; his position has apparently changed over the course of 8 years from opposing DOMA to supporting a constitutional amendment in Mass. to ban gay marriage but create civil unions. The polls on this are close, but I think that sort of compromise defines the mainstream on this. In terms of a federal constitutional amendment, all the polls I've seen show only minority support. Re: the sidenote. AJ is free to believe that a compromise involving civil unions or a constitutionalization of the DOMA was ever in the cards for the Republican leadership; I don't think so, and if it was, the collapse of such proposals shows not only that the Republicans are in hock to the religious right, but that they are largely cynical about it. Mr. Bush had every opportunity to make clear which version of the amendment he supported. He had every opportunity to abandon ship once it became clear which version was going to be proposed, weeks if not months before the Senate voted. Mr. Bush finally did endorse the most extreme version of the FMA, and used his radio address to do so in Santorum-ian terms. Wishing that he hadn't doesn't change anything, and the possibility that it was a cynical ploy doesn't reflect particularly well on him.

-Okay, I see I'm running over the boundary between quick points and longer ones. I'll just finish by returning to my own original point of departure, which is that extremism on the president's side more than makes up for leftism on Kerry's. Evidence? Every single poll shows Kerry leading among independent, undecided, and swing voters. You can argue that they don't know enough about Kerry's record, but if the first $100 million Bush spent distorting it didn't move public opinion, I don't see why the second $100 million will be any more successful. More? Read this article. The Bush campaign has essentially conceded the undecided and independent vote to Kerry. Their plan to win? Maximize Republican turnout while retaining as much centrist support as possible. The Kerry campaign has taken the opposite approach, and can afford to considering how united the left is in its desire to unseat the president. I think that dynamic, Bush running to the right, and Kerry to the center, will define the remainder of the campaign, and not an attempt to paint Kerry as way to the left of the American political tradition (he's not, I'm sorry, but he's not; Hubert Humphrey was a follower of Michael Harrington, and I have a thousand more examples like that.) The exception, of course, will be the wall-papered convention, although I'm still hopeful that there might be a Pat Buchanan moment involving Rick Santorum, or maybe new Senate candidate Alan Keyes (a masterstroke, let me say); or, best of all would be if the Republicans gave a speaking slot to JDZ.