It's Only Business

[Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) on Don Imus's MSNBC show, Imus in the Morning, Nov. 23, 1999]

Imus: "Where are you on abortion, Senator McCain?"

McCain: "I'm pro-life and I have a pro-life record. I am strongly in favor of a dialogue between pro-life and pro-choice people. There are issues that we can agree on. We should make adoption much easier. As you know, we are adoptive parents. And we should improve foster care in America, which in some places is very deplorable. "Pro-choice and pro-life people want to eliminate abortion over time. We, again, are gridlocked by both ends of the spectrum who have turned the cause into a business. It's not in their interest to see us sit down and work together. I am going to start the dialogue. And then I'm going to work together with pro-life and pro-choice people to see if we can improve this situation and eventually eliminate abortion in America. And for us not to do so, I think is not only unfortunate, but it's another example of people - - we got cases where people are shooting at abortion clinics, and other otherwise intelligent people who say that that's the only issue that will determine their vote. That's not the way we want to address this very important issue in America."

Because pro-lifers live and breathe their lifelong commitment to mother and unborn child, we instantly go to Red Alert if it appears that someone who's mostly voted right in the past is distancing himself from the pro-life movement. Given that we are talking about life and death for tens of millions of unborn babies, that spontaneous, gut-level reaction should come as no surprise.

Speaking only for myself, I've always tried to avoid coming to a summary judgment too quickly. Why?

I know, for one thing, that often it requires great courage to be pro-life. For another thing, sometimes the evidence that the officeholder is preparing to bail out on the babies can be ambivalent, or at least can be read differently. And he or she may also be at a genuine crossroads, still undecided what course of action they will take.

But whether a potential flip-flopper is merely going through a rough patch of water or is preparing to jump ship (or is not consciously aware that the decision to bolt has already been made), he or she knows they have to live both with the political consequences of bailing out on a constituency of conscience and with the moral consequences that rumble up unbidden from their own consciences. These internal and external realities complicate an assessment of whether a heretofore ally is preparing to abandon the cause. Often the tipoff that clarifies and illuminates is whether they begin to demonize the Movement. After all, if he or she can persuade the public (and perhaps themselves) that we are no more than intolerant wretches who'd rather fight fruitless battles than look for "common ground," well, who can blame him or her for looking for a "Third Way," which is better than that espoused by the "extremists"?

And who wants to be around hypocrites? If pro-lifers aren't really in this to save unborn babies, then the politician can tell himself - - and everybody else - - that this is not an example of an officeholder abandoning unborn babies but rather the work of an honorable man saving the "cause" from those who are really motivated by baser concerns.

As you can see, these soothing rationalizations serves the dual function of dousing the flip-flop charge and salving the individual's conscience.

Please believe me when I say I have never and would never pretend that I can get inside a man's mind or his heart. Thus I would never say I know where Sen. John McCain's journey on abortion will finally take him, nor pretend to understand why he seems locked into a pattern of insulting, demeaning remarks when asked about abortion. But what I can see is the unmistakable implication of his comments: The abortion "issue" is kept alive by self-serving activists for whom it is a "business," and that McCain will move America "beyond" the abortion debate.

In the past several issues we've documented a series of troubling remarks from Sen. McCain that go back to last August. On the basic question - - does he support the reversal of Roe v. Wade - - Sen. McCain now says no, "certainly [not] in the short term, or even in the long term," because there is a "need" for abortion.

This is a fundamentally different issue than coming to the conclusion that it would be difficult-to-impossible to pass a constitutional amendment right now. Everybody acknowledges that truth.

It is rather whether one believes that reversing Roe is itself a good idea! Whatever he may have felt before, Sen. McCain now believes it is not a good idea.

What is doubly strange is that if you were to give credence to the musings of many commentators, NRLC's "real" concern about McCain is his crusade for campaign finance "reform."

This is an example of a truth - - we are very concerned and Sen. McCain has often been very angry with us for effectively making the case against campaign finance "reform" - - wrapped up in an extremely misleading falsehood - - that his position on abortion is actually fine and we would say so if only McCain weren't so committed to campaign finance "reform." Two brief comments.

First, without rehearsing all the ins and outs of the Heinz 57 varieties of campaign finance "reform" proposals, the common denominator is that they threaten the very survival of grassroots organizations such as NRLC. It is amazing to me that many pro-lifers do not know this. Even more discouraging is that some of them - - including people I talk to - - seem not to grasp what would happen if the voice of the largest, most effective single-issue pro-life organization in the world were effectively muted.

Whom, pray tell, would that leave to educate the public about the abortion positions of officeholders and those running for office? Such pro-life stalwarts as the New York Times and the Washington Post? No wonder the editorial pages of these publications have plundered entire forests to sell the self- serving notion that these noble "reforms" would purge the "system" of unhealthy contaminants, e.g., you and me.

Second, it is bad enough that Sen. McCain thinks we "need" abortion. It grows worse when he says flat out that those who disagree with him are "extremists" and worse yet when he brazenly insists it is in their "interest" to maintain "gridlock."

I don't know about you, but I don't take kindly to being told that my 22-year-commitment is merely a "business" decision, that it was the green eyeshade part of my personality that told me in 1981 to uproot my pregnant wife and move her 1,200 miles away from her family to work at NRLC.

What if I got a huge raise? Does that mean Sen. McCain believes it would be even less in my "self-interest" to stop abortionists from torturing, mangling, and ripping unborn babies to pieces?

How about you? Would a paycheck convince you that it was now time to stop fighting morally hobbled abortionists who can actually live with jabbing scissors into the heads of almost fully delivered babies and sucking out their brains?

In responding to radio personality Don Imus's question, "Where are you on abortion?" Sen. McCain barely allowed Imus to finish his sentence, he was that eager to respond. Imus's huge listening audience heard a variation of what Sen. McCain has developed more explicitly elsewhere: that in some ominous but unspecified way the comments of some unspecified pro-lifers lead to shootings at abortion clinics - - and that it is vaguely un- American to base one's vote on a single issue.

Consider: Sen. McCain's campaign finance "reform" would squelch our voices. Perhaps in service of that objective, 10 million or so people were told that (a) what comes out of the mouths of pro- lifers leads to the deaths of abortion clinic workers and (b) there are "otherwise intelligent" people who are so...what? - - unpatriotic? undemocratic? extremist? - - that they make a candidate's position on abortion the defining criterion in how they cast their ballot.

All of this is very troubling in its own right, made even more so now that Sen. McCain has emerged as the principal challenger to pro-life Texas Gov. George W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination. Perhaps the "dialogue" that Sen. McCain says he is going to broker can include those of us worried and confused by his opposition to the reversal of Roe v. Wade and his baseless charges against pro-lifers.

--dave andrusko [dha1245@juno.com]