There is no love lost between Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and the abortion lobby.
The Missouri Democrat unloaded about her election loss, telling the New York Times she found criticism from abortion activists “irritating” and wanted to tell these “dumb” young women to “shut up.”
They kept nagging, though. And now McCaskill isn’t just a lame duck, she is also bitter with naive liberals who couldn’t grasp the prudence of toning down abortion extremism in a socially conservative red state.
“They probably don’t understand that Trump’s success had a whole lot to do with economic angst,” McCaskill said before explaining why she chose to focus on “the meat and potatoes of this election which was all about will people be able to get healthcare, can they afford healthcare, what about the price of prescription drugs.”
It wasn’t that McCaskill was insufficiently pro-abortion. Challenger and Sen.-elect Josh Hawley was right when he said she had an “extreme record.” And NARAL agreed, awarding her a perfect 100 percent voting score. But voting correctly isn’t enough anymore, a lesson McCaskill learned the hard way.
“Shame on them if they don’t know my voting record,” an audibly annoyed McCaskill said, “and shame on them that they’re not working as hard as they can instead of trashing me because of my voting record in a hard state.”
But shame on McCaskill for failing to understand the new millennial abortion mindset. Democrats can’t just vote to protection abortion on demand. Democrats are expected to constantly affirm a woman’s sacred right to choose. The older, second-wave feminists knew how to wheel and deal and win political victories. These younger generation expect to be constantly coddled.
This is a problem in Missouri. Trump won the state and Republicans carried just about everything else. The state Senate, House, and governor’s mansion are all red. Even McCaskill is an anomaly here. She owes her 2012 election to a pseudo-science spewing Republican who thought the female body could prevent pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.”
McCaskill wishes young progressives understood this or, at very least, knew when to bite their tongue. What did she want to say to them during the campaign? “Shut up! You know really, I mean this is hard.”
“It would’ve been one thing if I ever waivered but I’ve had to take a lot of tough votes on this issue over the years. I have been standing in the breach for women’s rights as it relates to reproductive freedom for all of my adult life,” McCaskill told the New York Times.
“The fact that these young women didn’t realize that,” she continued, and couldn’t “just be quite, roll up their sleeves, and work their ass off for me was beyond irritating.”
Her critics will be equally as irritated the moment they find themselves with one Democratic vote fewer against the next conservative Supreme Court justice nominated to oppose Roe v. Wade. McCaskill opposed both Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
