Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Final Stretch

(Reprinted from the issue of September 23, 2004)

There may be only one word for John Kerry’s campaign, and it seems to fall to me to coin it: Dukakisian. Whatever Michael Dukakis’s message may have been in 1988, nobody ever heard it, because he let the Republicans keep him on the defensive throughout the campaign.

Kerry is helping President Bush even more than Dukakis helped his father. He doesn’t even have a slogan, let alone a message. He has taken so many confusing positions that the only theme I can distill is that he’ll give us even bigger government than Bush will. If you feel that the federal government is still too small, you can make a case for Kerry. Reducing or even limiting the size of government isn’t an option.

As Dick Morris points out in The New York Post, even Kerry’s supporters don’t really like him! Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase “Kerry enthusiast.” Such an animal apparently doesn’t exist outside the hamster-loving community. Whereas many of Bush’s backers really love him, even deem him a great president, Kerry’s support comes chiefly from people who loathe Bush.

And yet Kerry may win. A Newsweek analysis shows Kerry leading in electoral votes, 233 to 181, with the rest up for grabs. In an odd reversal of the 2000 election, Bush could win the popular vote yet lose in the Electoral College. In that case, the Republicans would probably keep control of Congress, giving us what may be the best overall outcome: gridlock.

Real conservatives who support Bush, in spite of their discontent with him, usually argue that he would make better court appointments than Kerry would; Kerry would surely choose justices who would favor legal abortion, same-sex marriage, and other monstrosities. Here is where gridlock comes in: Would the Republican Senate confirm Kerry’s choices as compliantly as it confirmed Bill Clinton’s? Or would it, under pressure from conservatives, put up a fight for a change? On the other hand, Bush himself has ignored the Constitution in the legislation he has promoted.

A witty reader puts the issue to me this way: “We are reduced to hoping that Bush will appoint justices conservative enough to strike down the laws Bush supports.”

If the choice is between Bush and Kerry, Bush may be slightly preferable. But if you think of the options as Bush and gridlock, I’d prefer gridlock, which would at least retard the growth of government — provided Kerry was blocked from filling the judiciary with liberal madmen.
 
The News Makes News

CBS News has provided another distraction Kerry doesn’t need: a bogus report that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard in order to avoid going to Vietnam, then failed to report for duty. The story was almost immediately shown to be based on forged documents, yet, as of this writing, Dan Rather has stubbornly refused to disown it — or even to reveal the source of the documents he is swearing by. The suspicion grows that Rather got this stuff from a Democrat dirty tricks operation; if so, he was culpably gullible and his reluctance to come clean becomes understandable. Further, ABC News reports that CBS disregarded experts’ warnings that those documents were phony.

The scandal is seriously damaging CBS’s reputation for impartial reporting. Suddenly the Republicans’ complaints about its bias, which often sound like partisan whining, are shown to have substance. Some are demanding that CBS fire Rather and even purge the top tier of its news operation.

More broadly, the story is reinforcing public doubts as to whether the major news media can be trusted. And the public’s trust is their chief asset, especially at a time when so many people are turning to other sources of information. If the big media want us to feel that they are more reliable than talk radio and Internet rumors, their stories had better be more solidly grounded than this one.

The Kerry campaign has been howling that Kerry has been the victim of lies about his war record. But now that story has been upstaged by really outrageous lies about Bush’s record. A presidential election shouldn’t be decided by such irrelevant squabbles about the remote past, but with Bush’s lead in the polls widening and the clock running out, it looks well nigh impossible for Kerry to reshape the debate before November.
 
Whatever Happened to the Third Trimester?

Last week in these pages, James K. Fitzpatrick, with his usual trenchancy, pointed out John Edwards’s inconsistency on abortion: As a legislator he has supported it up to the moment of birth, but as a trial lawyer he assumed the unborn child’s humanity when it suited his purpose (namely, winning huge damages from doctors). Bravo!

Which reminds me that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its infamous 1973 rulings, struck down laws prohibiting abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy, but, you may recall, allowed a legitimate state interest in banning it so during the final trimester. This was hardly consistent, but evidently Harry Blackmun and his colleagues felt that permitting the slaughters of “viable” babies might be more than the American public would accept.

But once we became inured to abortion in principle, the pro-abortion movement felt it could get away with following the court’s logic to the bitter end of infanticide, so long as it could be passed off as just another form of abortion. The courts have followed suit, and the state’s “legitimate interest,” along with the criterion of “viability,” has evaporated. These were only interim concessions, granted only until the public conscience should harden further.

Shifting rationales have always been the chief tactic of the pro-abortion movement. At first it argued for permitting abortion as a necessary evil: Despite laws against it, and though it was an evil, it “happens anyway” (so do all crimes, by the way), and prohibitions did more harm than good. The next stage was the agnostic argument: Nobody could say whether abortion was right or wrong; it was a “religious” question and a “deeply personal decision.” Finally abortion became a positively good thing, a “fundamental human and constitutional right,” and the state should maximize, not minimize, its occurrence by subsidizing it.

Thus a gradual, step-by-step, but hardly slow erosion of the public’s moral sense was achieved, abetted by the constant defamation of anti-abortion forces as religious fanatics. And at every step, abortion advocates have discarded the arguments and concessions they once found useful, counting on the public to forget.

As Fitzpatrick says, we’re taught that it’s impolite to attack our opponents’ motives. But they expose their own insincerity in the shoddy self-contradictions of their arguments, as witness John Edwards’s on-again, off-again concern for the child in the womb.


Martians in New Jersey? With weapons of mass destruction? Orson Welles once found a receptive audience for this story, recalls SSOBRAN’S. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran