It's Saturday morning tin-foil hat time! The Kerry campaign has launched a values push. Noam Scheiber has his doubts, especially on abortion:
IS KERRY OVERREACHING ON VALUES?: I'm all for this latest Kerry-Edwards push on values.
...But I'm a little worried Kerry has become needlessly ambitious on the values front, wading into the weeds on divisive social issues like abortion when vague statements of principle would do.
For example, today's Washington Post reports that Kerry recently said he believes life begins at conception even though he supports a woman's right to an abortion. Now this is a position I imagine a lot of mainstream Catholics share. But it's also one that, once you've made it explicit, invites the charge that you condone something you think is murder. Why not just reprise Clinton's old "safe, legal, and rare" mantra and leave it at that?
Well, well, well. We had posted on that very point over the holiday weekend, when the Senator offered more detail on his evolving thoughts on this issue. Part of our criticism of Kerry's position (not original to us, regrettably), was that Kerry gave a speech to NARAL in January 2003 which did not sound at all like "safe, legal, and rare". The speech was sitting prettily at the Kerry website, and the link was fine.
The link was fine on July 5, that is. In what may simply be a semi-annual web-site clean-up, the Kerry website has dropped that speech, so that four days later, it's gone. But not forgotten.
Now, what, if anything, am I alleging? On the one hand, I don't normally swing a lot of traffic; on the other hand, it would not take many hits for a speech from January 2003 to go from zero to more than zero, so depending on what reports the webmaster is seeing, who knows? On the other other hand, who is kidding whom? Kerry gave the speech, and it is available elsewhere.
Still, it strikes me as an odd coincidence, and I would hate to leave all the fun to TNR.
MORE: To illustrate my point about Kerry's tone at the NARAL pep rally, contrast his remarks with those of Joe Lieberman, who said:
...And that is why we say and we mean we are not pro-abortion, we are pro-choice. [applause].
If a woman, if a woman chooses to have an abortion, we want it to be safe and we want that choice, as President Clinton reminded us, to be rare, to be the exception...
The closest Kerry comes is this:
Each of us tonight has talked about the difficulty of this decision and I heard Kate's comments earlier before we came out about the difficulty of her choice. I think anyone who has talked to or knows a woman has faced the dilemma of choice knows how difficult, how painful, how lonely, and how consequential it is. We will not go back to the days of back alleys, days in which women were shamed and put to all kinds of risks in this country. We will not put women in a place where the choice is between criminality or having a child that they don't want.
Invoking "back alleys" (abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, BTW) is not quite up there with "safe, legal, and rare".
Comments