Word: roe
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...G.O.P. race features real differences among the candidates on important and salient issues. Giuliani is pro-choice-and apparently pro-Roe v. Wade-in a pro-life, anti-Roe party. McCain is for something like amnesty for illegal immigrants in a party that is not. There's lots of room for Romney to move up, which he is now doing (he leads in a new Iowa poll), and for Thompson to get in (which he intends to do next month). Romney or Thompson will then battle to become the conservative alternative. It's quite possible that the winner of that...
...second Republican debate, on May 15, Romney tried repositioning his earlier pro-choice views as a mass of quivering equivocation. He claimed he was always "personally pro-life." Then, as Governor of Massachusetts, dealing with issues such as "embryo farming," he changed his mind and decided that Roe v. Wade "cheapened the value of human life...
...this strategy and how clever it is. In the first Republican presidential debate, Giuliani tried to project ambivalence (not a bad place to be on abortion), but it came out as indifference (a bad place to be). He said it was O.K. with him if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and O.K. with him if it didn't. So his campaign decided to go with a "standing firm" narrative instead, as if these were racks of suits from which you could choose the one you thought fit the best. If "standing firm" seems like a clever campaign strategy...
Ever since Roe, politicians seeking a middle ground on abortion have been attracted to this notion of personal opposition but official toleration. Its roots go back to John F. Kennedy's famous speech to the Protestant ministers of Houston, in which Kennedy essentially offered voters a deal: If you won't allow my religion to affect the way you vote, I won't allow my religion to affect the way I govern. Giuliani and Romney both want that deal...
...Washington--but that didn't always lead to action. For all his public fire breathing, White House aides found him low-key and respectful in private; he did not march into the Oval Office with a to-do list. Falwell backed Presidents whose Supreme Court nominees chose to uphold Roe v. Wade rather than overturn it. Even as the bookstores filled with alarmed accounts of the rise of a new American Theocracy, what many conservative Christians saw was that the boardroom, not the sanctuary, remained the real Republican hallowed ground. When the Christians' interests clashed with the G.O.P. business wing...