NRL News
Page 2
April 2009
Volume 36
Issue 4

Obama Sells an Audacious Bill of Goods
By Dave Andrusko

“One important lesson pro-choice progressives should take from recent setbacks is the value of developing a vision and a long-term strategic plan. ... Progressives should now take the time to take the long view and formulate ambitious goals, informed by deep ideological commitments and not unduly constrained by present realities. In short, progressives should think big in defining objectives and devise effective strategies for moving toward these objectives.”
     Dawn Johnsen, speaking to the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy in January 2008. Johnsen, who has drunk deeply from the most extreme pro-abortion pool of ideas, is pro-abortion President Barack Obama’s choice to be the influential assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

“As his very first pick for one of the very powerful federal courts of appeals, Obama recently nominated David Hamilton, a federal district judge in Indiana. Hamilton was the vice president for litigation for the Indiana chapter of the Illinois affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one of the major pro-abortion litigating outfits, before President Clinton put him on the federal bench.”
     From “Move Over, Bill Clinton: A New Abortion President,” by NRLC’s Derrick Jones

“[P]eople on both sides of the stem cell debate say Mr. Obama’s announcement could lead to a reconsideration of the ban on Capitol Hill, an idea so controversial and fraught with ethical implications that the mere discussion of it would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, when President George W. Bush was in office.”
     Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, March 8. The “ban” is a reference to the Dickey-Wicker amendment, which since 1995 has been a provision of the annual appropriations bills for federal health programs. This law prohibits the use of federal tax dollars to create human embryos, or research in which human embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.

At the risk of stating the stupendously obvious, candidate Barack Obama’s vague assurances that he would blur, if not erase, hyper-partisan political lines in Washington is sharply at odds with his actions as President. Is it possible to draw starker lines of demarcation than he has on abortion and related issues? Far from tempering the habitual pro-abortion zealotry of the leadership of the Democratic Party, Obama is forging an alliance with the outer fringe of the outer fringe of the Abortion Establishment.

When you say or write this, you can anticipate that those who are unfamiliar with Obama’s talent for rhetorical sleight of hand will roll their eyes. Our 44th President may be “pro-choice,” they say, but he is also committed to “reducing the number of abortions” and to finding “common ground.” Beyond blowing an occasional kiss our way, evidence for this is in short supply.

I understand that the American people chose Obama over another candidate who had a good pro-life record. But I also understand that it was very important to Obama’s victory that he promised to move beyond the usual back-and-forth on abortion.

And he has, but not in the way most people would have guessed or wanted. Obama is undertaking a kind of anti-life Lewis and Clark expedition, exploring new frontiers in pro-abortion extremism with companions the likes of Dawn Johnsen.

Their two-fold goal is as audacious as it is unknown to the American people. Their mission goes beyond obliterating every pro-life gain, however large or small, made since 1973. That’s child’s play. Unbeknownst to all but those who follow the issues minute by minute, they also embrace a kind of pro-abortion militancy supported only by a tiny percentage of an unsuspecting public.

The morning I wrote these remarks I read a piece by John Dickerson at slate.com. It was titled “The Careful Exaggerator: How Obama Balances His Rhetoric to Fit the Situation.” Since this editorial is about truth-telling and Obama’s ability to disguise his breathtakingly extremist agenda, I found Dickinson’s too-generous-by-half analysis intriguing.

Dickerson’s initial explanation/rationalization for Obama is largely benign. He argues that Obama “exaggerates to free himself from the demands of the news cycle.” What “Obama hopes to do though this exaggerated description is make all criticism seem like an irrational rush to judgment.”

He then tells us that (“for rhetorical effect”) Obama “doesn’t mischaracterize, exactly, but he exaggerates to bring his point into higher relief.” A little less benign.

“It is in domestic political battles with Republicans, however, that the president’s exaggerations may be sharpest,” Dickerson writes. “They are intended to make his opponents look foolish.”

Dickerson is essentially saying (as becomes clear in the final paragraphs) that he wants and expects Obama to live up to what Dickerson describes as Obama’s pride in “considered speech.” He flatters Obama, offering as how “few politicians have talked and written about improving political dialogue as much as he has.”

But on a scale of 1 to 10, “improving political dialogue” ranks at about minus 140 for Obama. When it comes to our issues, there is no point of contact between Obama’s high-flying promises to find “common ground” and his actions on the ground as president.

Let’s look at a few examples, beginning with Obama’s March 9 executive order that overturned the carefully crafted policy on embryonic stem cells instituted by pro-life President George W. Bush. The impression he left was that the only difference would be that federal dollars would now flow to researchers who would harvest so-called “spare embryos” for their stem cells. And for good measure, Obama told us, science henceforth would be free of “politics” and “ideology.”

But, in truth, nothing in what Obama said limited the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the use of stem cells scavenged from spare embryos created in IVF clinics. Why is this important? Because many researchers never did focus on (or have long since stopped caring about) what is in fact the relatively small number of human embryos parents are willing to have experimented on. The researchers are eager to create human embryos, by cloning and other methods.

As an alert sent out by NRLC makes clear, it is likely that there will be a “bait-and-switch” ploy on stem cell research. Members of Congress will be told that proposed legislation only authorizes NIH stem cell research on spare embryos. In fact, it “will also empower NIH to use human embryos created especially to be used in research, including embryos created by human cloning.”

Dawn Johnsen wasn’t kidding last year when she talked about “tak[ing] the time to take the long view and formulate ambitious goals, informed by deep ideological commitments and not unduly constrained by present realities.” And things have changed markedly in her direction. In 2008 the “present realities” included a pro-life President. Now the Oval Office is occupied by a soul mate to Planned Parenthood, NOW, and the ACLU.

And who is Dawn Johnsen? “She has a long history as a pro-abortion strategist, propagandist, and litigator, including about five years as legal director for NARAL, as well as work on behalf of the ACLU and Abortion Rights Mobilization,” as NRLC explained in an action alert. “Throughout her career, Johnsen has expressed her opposition to all limitations on abortion in vivid terms, and she has often criticized courts for being, in her view, insufficiently expansive in their application of pro-abortion legal doctrine. For example, Johnsen has criticized the Supreme Court rulings that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Hyde Amendment that prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, and others.” I could go on, but you get the point.

We all know these are difficult times for the Right to Life Movement. But it is not the first time we have faced daunting odds, nor will it be the last.

We know the Obama Abortion Agenda is as far from where the American people are as the east is from the west. Our job is to clear away the fog so the public can see the real Barack Obama up close and personal.

And when we accomplish that goal, their eyes will be opened to the truth--that they have been sold an audacious bill of goods.