A Singular Issue - Why Abortion Should Doom Giuliani’s Campaign

(Hat tip: Darwin Catholic)

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru on Rudy and Abortion:

In April, a reporter overheard Rudy Giuliani explaining his theory of the campaign: “that the other candidates would divide up the ‘right-wing’ voters, as he called them, leaving him to consolidate the moderates and the economic and military conservatives who aren’t fixated on social issues.” It was a perfectly reasonable analysis. People for whom prohibiting abortion is a top priority are not going to favor the presidential campaign of a man who wants to keep abortion legal and, indeed, to subsidize it. It would be irrational if they did favor it, and it would be irrational for Giuliani to court them.

Since Giuliani’s campaign began, however, vast quantities of political commentary have been devoted to obscuring these simple truths. Generally this commentary has come from writers who do not themselves care about protecting unborn life but feel qualified to lecture people who do about how they should advance their agenda. While the emphases of the commentators vary, their basic argument is that presidents cannot do much to affect abortion policy except to appoint judges, and that Giuliani is just as conservative as the other candidates on that question.

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In a way, Giuliani’s nomination would cause more trouble for the pro-life cause than his election would. The pro-life cause can survive without a pro-life president: It emerged from the Clinton years stronger than it had been at their beginning. But it will find it harder to survive without a pro-life party. And that would be the meaning of his nomination, even if most Republican congressmen and governors remained pro-life, and even if the party platform, left unread and unheeded, continued to offer solidarity to the unborn. America has been a presidential nation, politically, for almost a century now. The parties are, in the public mind, their leaders; and those leaders are their presidential nominees.

The most specific polls on abortion policy ask respondents whether they think abortion should be banned altogether, banned with exceptions when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or resulted from rape, or allowed. Such polls consistently find that the people who want to ban abortion altogether and the people who want to ban it with rare exceptions add up to a majority of Americans. If Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, that majority will have no representation at the level of presidential politics. We will instead have a contest between a candidate who believes that taxpayers should fund abortion through the federal government and one who believes they should do it through state governments.

In 1973, the Supreme Court tried to declare an end to the state-by-state debate on abortion by setting abortion policy nationally. The New York Times, the next day, reported on the decision as a “historic resolution” of the abortion controversy. Before that day, supporters of legal abortion had claimed that their policy was necessary for women’s equality, or population control, or the promotion of liberty. On that day, however, they acquired the most powerful arrow in their quiver: the assertion that abortion policy was a settled matter, an assertion that had the strong support of the country’s journalistic, financial, and legal elites. The principal reason that the question has not been closed is that over the last 30 years the Republican party has stood — shakily at times, it is true, but always officially — against this elite consensus.

The abortion lobby would not be alone in declaring the Republican party to have capitulated to this consensus with Giuliani’s nomination. So would neutral observers; and even some pro-lifers would give up the fight.

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The pro-life position has carried real costs for the Republican party, in terms of lost votes. But those costs have been more than offset by the gains the party has made. For more than two decades, exit polls have shown that people who vote on the basis of abortion are far more likely to be pro-lifers than pro-choicers. (Using that measure, the issue netted George W. Bush 2.4 million votes in 2000.) Without the realignment of American politics based on social issues — a realignment caused by abortion more than any other issue — the Republicans would never have attained the near-parity they have today.

Now would be a strange moment in our politics for Republicans to abandon the pro-life cause, or even to weaken their commitment to it. The party is in serious trouble these days, for all kinds of reasons — but its pro-life position is not one of them. The public has been moving in a pro-life direction. In this season of Republican discontent, for the first time ever, a few polls show more Americans identifying themselves as pro-life than pro-choice...

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Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this issue:
Single-Issue Extremist