Raising the Ante

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

One needn't be a political guru or even particularly bright to have anticipated that the increasingly bitter slugfest between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama was a train wreck in the making. It's ugly now and it will grow far uglier over the weeks and months to come as they spar over the party's presidential nomination.

That's all visible on the political radar to anyone with eyes to see. However, largely under the radar is their increasingly fierce struggle to win the title "Most Rabidly Pro-Abortion Politician In the Galaxy." This gets kind of complicated, so please bear with me.

Yesterday, for example, the Obama and Clinton campaigns held what amounted to back-to-back conference calls with reporters. The backdrop is, according to "The Swamp" (a Baltimore Sun blog written by Mike Dorning), that the Obama campaign has apparently been convinced that one of the reasons he lost unexpectedly in New Hampshire was Clinton's allegations that he did not (so to speak) bleed pro-abortion.

"The literature against Obama has focused on a series of 'present' votes Obama cast as a state legislator on controversial measures to restrict abortion rights," Dorning wrote. "A present vote allows a legislator to avoid a public stand for or against a measure. The Clinton campaign and two pro-abortion rights groups supportive of her candidacy--EMILY's List and National Organization for Women--have used those votes to question Obama's commitment to abortion rights."

Obama's comeback was that this strategy had the blessing of the state Planned Parenthood group, although an investigation by the Chicago Tribune found few legislators who "remembered such a strategy."  The Obama campaign rolled out Pam Sutherland, president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, who "vouched again in the conference call that Obama's present votes were made a the request of Illinois abortion-rights advocates."

What would be the rationale for giving Obama and other pro-abortion Democrats political cover? According to Dorning, by voting "present," they wouldn't have to cast "politically damaging 'no' votes against popular abortion restrictions," such as the "The Born Alive Infant Protection Act."

The Clinton folks then countered with their own conference call that included a former leader of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization for Women NOW, who said, "Obama and other lawmakers should have voted a firm 'no' on the abortion restrictions." In the same conference call, Clinton supporter Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY's List, offered what she said was a contrast between the positions of the two candidates. "It's that kind of leadership [by Clinton] we're looking for in our Democratic nominee," Malcolm said, according to the Boston Globe.

Not to be outdone "the Obama's campaign released excerpts of a letter Malcolm sent to Obama in 2006 thanking him for speaking at one of the group's events," the Globe reported this morning. "Her letter, according to Obama's campaign, included this handwritten note: 'You were terrific and really lit a fire with our members! Thanks so much!!'"

There is already more to this story--and surely more wrinkles to come--that we will talk about at a future date. Clinton and Obama are in a bidding war, the results of which the America public will learn about in the months to come.

Regardless of which is the most hysterically anti-life (in truth, a difference without a distinction), we know that both Clinton and Obama would dutifully carry water for the most militant pro-abortion groups with an unrelenting vigor.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.