In the six days from June 6 to June 11, Bob Dole engineered not one but two astonishing developments in internal Republican abortion politics. On the seventh day he rested, sitting square in the middle of the resulting rubble. It is not clear how he will get back up.
On Thursday, June 6, it looked as though Mr. Dole had accomplished the impossible: mollifying the GOP’s pro-life and pro-choice camps with subtle diplomacy concerning their ritualized, bitter dispute over the party platform’s abortion plank. During interviews with ABC and CNN, Dole restated his commitment to the pro-life cause; later in the day, his campaign announced that Dole would not “seek or accept retreat” on the question at the upcoming San Diego convention. Just the same, Dole said he welcomed the support of pro-choice voters, and the next day’s newspapers reported that he would endorse new, penumbral language in the platform acknowledging that the party was home to broadly divergent views.
Okay, said the GOP’s strongest voices on abortion, pro and con. And they stayed okay for the next four days, pleased over the possibility of a relatively peaceful convention at which each side might claim a symbolically meaningful victory. But on Monday, June 10, Mr. Dole began to undo his own skilled handiwork, telling CNN that the platform’s forthcoming “big tent” phraseology was “not negotiable” and would probably be attached specifically to the abortion plank. Faced with the prospect of a platform in which abortion, alone among subjects, would be singled out for nice-making ambiguity, pro-life leaders issued unhappy warnings. Pro-choice Republicans like Pete Wilson and Bill Weld were emboldened to demand further concessions. And the next day, Dole poured gasoline on this emerging fire, with a direct and irritable televised attack on his pro-life critics, who now threaten to mount a full-scale convention battle over the platform — and maybe sit the election out.
The mainstream media, always dense with disdain for those who see and proclaim the evil of abortion clearly, discern a risky but necessary calculation in Dole’s maneuvers. According to one academic “authority on the politics of abortion,” quoted approvingly by the New York Times, “These pro-life people will probably vote for Dole anyway, and to have them scream at him makes it look like he’s not captive.” It’s like Clinton and Sister Souljah in 1992, the Washington Post speculates — an effort by Dole to distance himself from his party’s least popular constituency.
Nonsense. Sister Souljah was a freak who had publicly endorsed black-on- white murders. Needless to say, this view had no delegates to the Democratic national convention; Clinton’s disavowal of it was free of charge. Dole, by contrast, has picked a fight he may well lose with the GOP’s most important and reliable base — serious people, pace the Times and the Post, with a serious and noble idea. In the process, he has invited eight weeks of unremitting and unflattering press obsession with this battle, deflected attention from the Clinton administration’s appallingly abortion-friendly record, and almost guaranteed a week-long display of internecine ugliness in San Diego.
It will cost him. And it will damage the pro-life cause. The abortion platform plank the GOP will now make civil war over is flawed, after all. It is insufficiently prolife. The most controversial of its five short sentences proposes an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. But the plank’s four other sentences fail to commit the party to the awesome task of public persuasion necessary to achieve that goal.
That work will not get started this year, it seems. Bob Dole appears to believe it is impossible. “I mean, this is a moral issue,” he says with exasperation. As if opinions grounded in morality were immutable, like curly hair, and all arguments about them were pointless and impolite.
American abortion politics have never been particularly healthy. Bob Dole has made the patient sicker.
David Tell, for the Editors
