The Self-Pity of the Pro-Life Democrat

There are a lot of irritating things about Peter Boyer’s recent New Yorker article about Robert Casey’s Senate bid in Pennsylvania. Now, to be clear, I believe that politics is strategic and the art of the possible. I’m all for doing what you have to do to get Rick Santorum out of the Senate, and while an anti-choice President is unacceptable it may be tolerable in some legislators depending on the context. Still, the article hits pretty much every piece of specious conventional wisdom on the subject–assuming without evidence that abortion is a particularly bad issue for Democrats, focusing on lost voters without focusing on voters gained, and discussing Casey Sr. being denied a speech at the 1992 convention while conveniently omitting that Casey Sr. wouldn’t endorse Clinton. But this passage really is particularly infuriating:

What galls Democrats like Tim Roemer is that, even though the Republican core is as doctrinaire on abortion as the Democratic base is, Republicans have managed to create an impression of tolerance for differing opinions within the Party. “As the nineteen-nineties progressed, the Republicans, at least symbolically, became more of the big-tent party, with pro-choice governors, mayors, people like Giuliani and Schwarzenegger, highlighting their versatility on this issue,” Roemer says. “The Democratic Party veered toward putting the flaps down on the tent. They’re steered more by some of these special-interest groups, and, not being able to elect some of the pro-life Democrats in districts, we lost to Republicans.” Roemer speaks from unhappy experience. A few weeks after Kerry gave his talk to America Votes, and as Schumer was trying to sell Party activists on the idea of the pro-life Casey, Roemer launched a campaign to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He ran on a platform of national security (he had served on the 9/11 Commission), tolerance of differing views on abortion, and a return to traditional Democratic values. He pointed to the fact that Democrats had lost ninety-six of the hundred fastest-growing counties in the nation–an unpromising trend for a party trying to regain majority status. Roemer was vigorously opposed by pro-choice activists, who lined up behind Howard. Dean’s successful candidacy. “I had some pretty piercing and nasty opposition research done on me in the D.N.C. race that I don’t think the Republicans had done quite so well in my six races for the House of Representatives,” Roemer says.

What a bunch of nonsense. First of all, as I’ve discussed before, you would think that the GOP’s ability to convey the false impression that they’re a “big tent” on abortion while the Democrats are extremists (although the Democratic position isn’t so unpopular that it has to tell its Supreme Court nominees to avoid the subject) just arose in a vacuum. In fact, it happens because dumbass Vichy Democrats like Roemer keep doing things like talking about token speeches at the GOP convention that didn’t mention abortion at all and were made by non-national politicians (one of whom needed a special election because he wouldn’t have been able to win a Republican primary in one of the most liberal states in the country.) And imply that Democrats have some universal pro-choice litmus test while ignoring the fact that the most powerful Democratic politician in the country is pro-life–and even as strident a pro-choicer as I think he’s done a great job–while nobody in the Republican congressional leadership is pro-choice. And wonder why the abortion debate is being fought on Republican-chosen terrain while they fail to mention that the Republican platform endorses a (very unpopular) constitutional amendment that would make abortion first-degree murder in all fifty states.

But there’s another problem here. Roemer, truly the wanker’s wanker, continues to boo-hoo about his being denied the chairmanship of the DNC. What Boyer is allowing Roemer to imply is that he’s a solidly progressive Democrat who happens to be pro-life (like our friends Hugo and Russell), and this is the only reason he was opposed. And, certainly, communitarian lefties should be a welcome part of the progressive movement. But in Roemer’s case, it’s just horseshit. Roemer voted for Bush’s upper-class tax cuts while voting against Clinton’s 1993 budget, and also favored Social Security privitization. Roemer’s not a pro-life progressive; he’s an unprincipled conservative Democrat. And this is far from unusual–in general, Democrats who are anti-choice are much more likely to be reactionary on economic issues. The idea that the Dems are systematically blacklisting solidly progressive pro-lifers is simply not true.

And so I’m not just going to accept on blind faith the assertion that Casey is a staunch progressive who happens to be anti-choice. In the Boyer article, Chuck Schumer argues that Casey’s opposition to reproductive rights isn’t a problem because “[t]here’s no worry on judges.” Really? As eRobin notes, Casey has refused to come out against Alito, although Alito is if anything even more unambiguously reactionary when it comes to worker’s rights than when it comes to reproductive rights. Maybe Casey really is a solid progressive, and certainly he has to be better than Santorum. But let’s remember that Dems who are conservative on choice often sell out on other issues too.

UPDATE: In comments, Matt Weiner notes that Boyer does mention Casey’s non-endorsement in passing; my mistake, although he makes it appear as if the non-endorsement followed his inability to speak rather than vice-versa. He has more on the article here. [edited to distinguish between the two Caseys.]

…More from Matt Stoller.