Upping the Ante:
Pro-Abortion Clinton Clobbers Pro-Abortion Obama

Editor's note. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

No one who has watched Bill and Hillary Clinton was surprised when the gloves came off this week. Having seen her margin in national polls sharply diminish and her lead in Iowa evaporate, everybody knew Sen. Clinton would throw everything, including the kitchen sink and garbage disposal unit, at her chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama's camp brags about his 100% pro-abortion voting record. But yesterday Clinton's alleged that Obama took a walk on a number of abortion-related votes when he was an Illinois state senator is so intriguing. "For legislators who don't want to take a stand, there's a third way to vote. Not yes, not no, but present, which is kind of like voting maybe," she said.

What is Clinton talking about? While in the Illinois Senate, Obama wanted to have his cake on the abortion issue and eat it too. And--get this--the local Planned Parenthood helped him with the recipe.

According to an item that appeared on an ABC News blog last July, "When Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., voted 'present,' rather than 'yes' or 'no' on a handful of controversial abortion votes in the Illinois state senate, he did so with the explicit support of the president and CEO of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council."

The issues were ones on which the American people have the exact opposite position from Sens. Clinton and Obama: partial-birth abortion and parental notification.

Pam Sutherland, the president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, told ABC News' Teddy Davis, "We at Planned Parenthood view those as leadership votes."  Why was Planned Parenthood "happy to give Obama latitude" by letting him vote "present"?

By working with Obama "specifically on his strategy," the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council could keep him (and other Democrats] from being "pigeonhole[d]," she said. In one of those revealing comments that pro-abortionists occasionally let slip, Sutherland told ABC News, "Most of the electorate is not going to know what that [voting 'present'] means."

For Obama, not only did he get to hide behind Planned Parenthood's skirts while a state senator, he gets to continue to use them as cover to maintain his pro-abortion bona fides as he competes for his party's presidential nomination.

As ABC News wrote last July, "[W]hile he competes for the Democratic presidential nomination, he can use his cooperation with Planned Parenthood in Illinois to help assure supporters of abortion rights across the country that he will not cross them."

What a deal!

Please send your comments to Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.