Holding Women Hostage To Fear

What's the best index by which to measure the panic coursing through the Barack Obama campaign and threatening to send its media cohorts into paroxysms of bitter rage?

It's not the public opinion polls, which are all moving in the direction of the pro-life ticket of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin. Nor is the electoral map, the composition of which is no longer so favorable for the pro-abortion freshman senator from Illinois.

The sure-fire measure of the growing hysteria is not just that they play the abortion card. Nothing new there. It is, rather, the extent to which the Obama campaign attempts to demonize the McCain/Palin ticket on the abortion issue, sinking to depths previously reserved for PPFA and NARAL, that makes you appreciate how out of control they actually are.

The visibility of the abortion issue grows clearer (and higher) weekly. Pro-abortion Prof. Cass Sustein, writing in yesterday's Boston Globe, put what is at stake in clear perspective.

"The right to reproductive freedom has played an occasional role in many presidential campaigns, but its fate is likely to turn on the 2008 election. Republican presidential candidate John McCain vows to 'return the abortion question to the individual states' and then 'to end abortion at the state level.' The new president will probably be in a position to appoint at least one and perhaps as many as three new justices. With an excellent chance to reconfigure the Supreme Court, McCain, if elected, might well be able to get what the antiabortion movement wants - and more fundamentally, numerous changes in other areas of constitutional law as well."

What did Gov. Palin have to say in her now famous three-part interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson last week?

Gibson: "Roe v. Wade, do you think it should be reversed?"

Gov. Palin: "I think it should and I think that states should be able to decide that issue... I am pro-life. I do respect other people's opinion on this, also, and I think that a culture of life is best for America."

Gibson, who played "gotcha" journalism early and often elsewhere in the interviews, respectfully asked her about her personal view on abortion and her position on embryonic stem cell research.

A decent respect for the truth was not the order of the day yesterday on ABC's This Week, hosted by George Stephanopoulos. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill turned up the volume level from the get-go, evidently convinced she could scare Americans in general, women in particular, into embracing pro-abortion Sen. Barack Obama. Unsaid, of course, is that Obama is an extremist on abortion by anyone's measure.

After strongly implying that Sen. McCain has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, McCaskill said, "[W]omen of America are going to kick the tires the next 55 days, George, and they're going to going to find out that this is a ticket that wants to put women in prison for having an abortion after they have been raped." Yes, she actually said this.

Carly Fiorina, victory chair for John McCain, is among the ticket's most articulate defenders. As calm as McCaskill was agitated, Fiorina responded,

"Those are ridiculous charges, point one. But I think the important point here is that this is what the Democratic Party has done for years. It has tried to hold women hostage by frightening them on issues such as reproductive rights, Roe v. Wade. American women in this country will not be held hostage by the politics of fear on Roe v. Wade anymore."

If ranting is one primary symptom of panicking, another is not thinking through strategy.

For example, it is self-evident that Sen. Obama needs to court supporters of Hillary Clinton. He might want to consider that, disproportionately, they are older. Making not so veiled suggestions that Sen. McCain is too old to be president is just dumb, dumb, and dumb.

And by the way, running an ad that tells people that Sen. McCain is out of touch because he doesn't do email runs into the same problem (as pro-abortion Geraldine Ferraro pointed out this morning. Ferraro, of course, was Walter Mondale's vice presidential selection in 1984). Moreover, had the Obama's campaign investigated even a little, they'd have found out that McCain can't use a keyboard without pain, thanks to his "hosts" at the Hanoi Hilton.

Talk to you tomorrow.