Official LRC President Donald J Trump Thread

Sally Vix wrote:

Flagpole wrote:

Sally is incapable of seeing any kind of pattern like that. His Battle of Marathon BS comment is a joke, just like he is. Never lived that down? How about not knowing how deer react to headlights? How about thinking the national debt was in billions of dollars and then emphasizing that by saying, "with a 'B'". How about bragging in this thread that he berated (angrily scolded) his wife for something she didn't even have any control over? Biggest dumb@ss a$$hole ever on this site.

Now now Flagpole. We had already at length discussed your anger issues but they seem to keep resurfacing. Think about it this way ... every minute you are angry is a minute that you not happy. Again, when you are angry for a minute that is a minute forever lost that you could have been happy. Here is a timely tip to you ... try killing your worst enemy with kindness. That person will be so befuddled that he or she won't know what to think. You might even gain a new friend. Despite the anger issues, you are still a swell guy (just an angry one).

johnny99 wrote:

Sally Vix wrote:

No no no the Democratic tent is not a big one. You don't have many types of views. If you are pro-life, you are a pariah in the Democratic community. A pariah, a persona non grata. That excludes half the population. How can you be a "big-tent" type of group when just one issue excludes half the population. I could go on with a few other issues but you do not have a big tent. Your tent is highly specific on who may enter it.

Apparently, you're wrong when you state that if you are pro-life you are a pariah in the Democratic Party. I'd never heard of this organization, but I googled Pro-life Democrats and this came up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_for_Life_of_America

And, to be fair, there actually is a Republicans for Choice organization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicans_for_Choice

Sally Vix wrote:

johnny99 wrote:

Apparently, you're wrong when you state that if you are pro-life you are a pariah in the Democratic Party. I'd never heard of this organization, but I googled Pro-life Democrats and this came up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrats_for_Life_of_America

And, to be fair, there actually is a Republicans for Choice organization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicans_for_Choice

Nice posting.

s more than a dozen Democrats jockey for their party's nomination, the conventional wisdom is that there are only a few political "lanes," and each important sub-segment of the electorate will eventually coalesce around a chosen candidate. Thus, there is tough competition for the progressive lane, the moderate lane, the black lane, and the woman lane. But no one is jostling for the pro-life lane.

One could argue that there is not a pro-life lane in the Democratic Party anymore. There is plenty of evidence to back up that assertion. In November, the Democratic Attorneys General Association announced it was requiring support for abortion rights or it would not endorse candidates or provide them financial assistance. DAGA trumpeted this explicit litmus test as "the first-of-its-kind for any Democratic campaign committee," but it seems unlikely to be the last. Kirsten Gillibrand declared in May 2019 that the Democratic Party should "be 100 percent pro-choice, and it should be nonnegotiable." She eventually left the presidential race not because her abortion absolutism was too radical but because it was too common.

Cory Booker is promising a "White House Office of Reproductive Freedom" and calls abortion rights "sacrosanct." At a June debate, Elizabeth Warren, when asked directly by NBC's Lester Holt if she would put "any limits on abortion," declined to identify a single one. Only Tulsi Gabbard has articulated any checks on abortion rights from the debate stage; in October, she tepidly noted her opposition to some third-trimester abortions. While that position may be supported by the vast majority of Americans, and even a majority of Democrats, it is an outlier among the leadership of the party. With only a few exceptions — Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana being the most notable — the vast majority of Democratic office holders are solidly on board the abortion bandwagon.

On the related issue of public funding for abortions, early frontrunner Joe Biden made news when he flipped and flopped and flipped again. Congressional freshman firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon thereafter declared that opposition to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for most abortions, is a "base level where all candidates need to be." No candidates have dared to disagree.

But while the current party alignment of pro-choice Democrats and pro-life Republicans seems solid, it has not been that way for long. Just a few decades ago, it was not at all clear that one party or the other was the party of life or of abortion rights. Americans, Democrats included, have not followed the leaders of the Democratic Party on their quest to sanctify abortion rights. By leaving the pro-life lane empty in 2020, Democratic presidential hopefuls may be passing up an opportunity — and leaving voters on the right and the left holding their noses again come November.

LINES IN SAND

As historian Daniel Williams bluntly states in his worthwhile book God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, "Prior to the mid-1970s, no one would have associated the GOP with opposition to abortion." Initially, the pro-life movement was largely responding to liberalizing state abortion laws, several signed by Republican governors including Ronald Reagan of California. Catholics were often at the forefront of this nascent right-to-life movement, and most Catholics voted for Democrats.

In 1972, the early frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination was Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a Catholic who spoke of the "sanctity" of unborn life. Even though Muskie would lose the nomination to the socially liberal George McGovern, the vice-presidential nod went to a Catholic pro-lifer, Sargent Shriver. Further, an effort from the party's feminist wing to insert an abortion-rights plank into the 1972 platform was soundly defeated, with 59% of the delegates voting against it.

In the early 1970s, abortion was still something of a second-tier national issue, with Americans focused more on the war in Vietnam, civil rights, crime, and the economy. In 1973, however, Roe v. Wade nationalized abortion policy and largely removed the power of state legislatures to address it. The self-sorting of voters motivated by the issue began in earnest in 1976, but the party lines were not immediately obvious and were quite soft at first.

The nation's bicentennial saw the privately pro-life Jimmy Carter sitting atop a Democratic Party with a platform that declared it "undesirable to attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in this area." Carter ran against the personally pro-choice President Ford who led a Republican Party that surprisingly emerged with a platform that noted a range of opinion within the party but ultimately supported a constitutional right-to-life amendment.

There is a case to be made that the GOP went on to become the party of life because of scheduling. The Republican National Convention was held a month after the Democratic convention, from whence a sizable pro-life contingent had emerged deeply upset by the pro-Roe platform. Ford also was going into his own convention with Ronald Reagan still a threat. Reagan had renounced the abortion bill he had previously signed and was courting the anti-abortion elements within the GOP. The pragmatic Ford saw the opportunity in a pro-life stance, which would help him both seal the nomination and peel off Catholic votes for the general election to come.

Ford's tactical shift, however, was a jolt to many in his party. The New York governor who had championed a permissive pre-Roe abortion statute in 1970 (and vetoed an effort to repeal it in 1972) was one Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican. The liberal laws turned New York City into an abortion destination, with thousands coming from out of state. In response, New York also became a hotbed of pro-life activism.

After Richard Nixon's resignation, Rockefeller had been appointed vice president in 1974 by the newly elevated President Ford. In 1976, however, Ford dropped Rockefeller from the ticket in an effort to shore up his right flank. In a bit of cross-pollination that epitomized these formative times, Bob Dole, who ultimately became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, consulted with the campaign of a pro-life Democratic presidential candidate. Ellen McCormack was a New York right-to-life activist who, without prior political experience, had run a single-issue candidacy that drew up to 9% of the vote in several Democratic state primaries. Dole and the GOP followed McCormack's advice and went on record officially, if a bit indirectly, as "support[ing] the efforts of those who seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children."

However disingenuous it may have been, the strategy worked. Before the conventions, Ford had been seen as anything but socially conservative. He had, after all, put the man synonymous with liberal Republicanism a heartbeat away from the presidency. Now, he was getting both the nomination and the nod from pro-life activists.

An endorsement from the right-to-life movement was significant for Ford, but not as significant as one might think. Decades later, when social scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell would run the numbers for their 2010 work, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, they would call abortion the primary "glue" that binds religiosity and partisanship together. That simply was not yet the case in the mid-1970s.

It would be a few years before the influential pastor, author, and filmmaker Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop would produce Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, their 1979 book and film series. Their work did much to catalyze an evangelical Protestant subculture that was not yet fully engaged with the pro-life cause. Schaeffer and company would also help inspire Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr., to form the Moral Majority, which boosted the GOP to victory in the 1980 presidential election cycle.

In 1976, though, the political cement that would harden into the Democratic Party's "God gap" was still wet. Though Falwell and Billy Graham helped Ford, the vocally "born again" Carter also had plenty of evangelical support. Even Pat Robertson — the religious broadcaster of The 700 Club fame who would run for president as a Republican in 1988 — backed Carter. And why not? Robertson was the son of a Democratic senator.

Despite a large lead at the start of the race, Carter ultimately won the election in a squeaker, barely surviving an ill-advised interview with Playboy. Associating himself with that magazine late in the campaign cost him more evangelical support than his confusing stance on abortion. Nevertheless, many of the faithful were still excited (if a bit anxious) to see what it would be like to have one of their own at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Would Brother Jimmy change Washington, or would Washington change him? As it turned out, Carter stayed much the same while both Washington and the politics of religious conservatives changed around him.