Hooey Alert -- Part One

Part 2

In our family all the language genes found their expression in one child. She speaks one foreign language fluently, is conversant in a second, and is learning a third. The rest of us struggle to say "hello" in Spanish.

When it comes to speaking about abortion, pro-abortion politicians have acute problems with their native tongue. They avoid using clear-cut language like the plague.

For example, knowing there was no upside for him to speak in English about abortion, in 2004 Sen. Kerry employed a foreign language of his own making, a curious amalgam that was as confusing as it was insincere. Because his verbiage moved beyond making the usual bogus claim to be "tolerant" on abortion to actually pretending to be "pro-life," it made for many awkward moments.

Moreover, when it came to abortion, Kerry often seemed genuinely tongue-tied. I recall one logic-begging series of internally inconsistent answers that he gave to the Associated Press on abortion. I wrote about it in TN&V.

I remember wondering at the time if Kerry hadn't printed out his campaign sound bites, taken a pair of scissors and cut the sentences into individual words, tossed them in a hat, spilled the contents on the floor, and then pasted his answers together willy nilly. His answers, literally, made no sense.

And it was all for naught. This incoherence acted as a double whammy for pro-abortionists such as Kerry.

Discerning voters saw through their transparent insincerity, which lost them credibility points, and, their pro-abortion position (in conjunction with their posture on a variety of other issues) cost them dearly with people of faith. What to do?

For the better part of two years, the pro-abortion Democratic Party leadership has sought a way to speak about abortion in a manner in which style completely trumps substance; it'd be all about atmospherics. Their goal was the equivalent of the unobtrusive smooth jazz many offices play over the sound system.

The objective is to soothe, not stir up, feelings about abortion. Note that while they pretend to be addressing the abortion issue, they never commit to opposing even a single abortion up to and including the sickening partial-birth abortion.

The only way to understand what they do is to appreciate that, for all practical purposes, they act as if pro-lifers and people of faith are synonymous. (In fact, they are overlapping categories with people opposing abortion for many reasons not derived from a faith base.)

So when Amy Sullivan writes a piece yesterday that appeared on www.slate.com titled "Not God's Party: A New Poll shows Democrats are losing (more) religious voters," it comes as no surprise that one way she insists Democrats can win over people of faith is to tell them that the likes of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid are the ones to look to for an action program that will truly reduce the number of abortions.

Sullivan alternates brutal candor with riffs of fancy and advanced excuse-mongering. "Many of the party's early efforts to attract religious voters, after all, were scattershot and not a little awkward," she writes. "No one knew quite what the 'faith staffer'--a new breed of legislative aide--was supposed to do, and random-seeming insertions of Bible verses into floor speeches came off as Tourette's syndrome for Democrats."

Sullivan adds, "Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has even stopped saying things to intentionally antagonize evangelicals," a change of behavior that cannot possible endure, by the way.

But after two years of effort, which includes offering candidates "tips for communicating with Catholic voters" and having candidates "appear on religious radio outlets," Sullivan tells us "the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved."

According to the Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, Democrats have lost ground across the religious spectrum.

"[W]hile 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is 'friendly' to religion," writes Sullivan. "That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that--in other words, a 16-point plunge over three years."

She adds ominously, "The decline is especially troubling because it cuts across the political and religious spectra, encompassing liberals and conservatives, white and black evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews."

She has lots of explanations/rationalizations. For example, Sullivan attributes the party's falling numbers to unfair characterizations ["stunts"] by Republicans and conservative organizations. Many mainstream journalists just "assume that Republicans are religious and Democrats are not," reinforcing an unhelpful "paradigm."

Just how [in]sincere the party may be was revealed in a paragraph in which Sullivan talked about "increasingly skeptical" Catholic voters. In the last year alone, there has been a decline of 9% in support for what she describes as "Democrats' approach to religion." Yet even as the party "hemorrhages Catholic support at the polls," it is hugely revealing that for the past year the Democratic National Committee has been looking to hire "a national party staffer to focus on Catholic outreach and strategy" but "with no results."

After offering this litany of bad-to-disastrous news, Sullivan ends by counseling Democratic Party leaders to remain calm. There is a way out for Democrats--most specifically pro-abortion Democrats, she says.

And that is to (1) convince these voters that Democrats have a corner on other issues; (2) "re-embrace the concept of the common good that once united religious and political progressives"; and--as mentioned earlier-- (3) pretend that leaders who are in the hip pocket of the Abortion Establishment can be relied on to reduce the number of abortions.

Well, #1 is beyond our purview; #2 is (contrary to Sullivan's assertion) not the province of any single political party; and #3 is hooey, the kind of deception that you and I will counter 24/7.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part 2