TNR: "Stop kidding yourself: John McCain is a pro-life zealot":
McCain has spent years manipulating the public's perception of his stance on abortion and reproductive health. He's been against overturning Roe v. Wade and he's been for it; he's embraced the idea of a pro-choice running mate and, more recently, recoiled from it. It's no wonder the public is confused.
The right has been twisted in knots for years over whether McCain respects "life" enough to earn its support. And, among Democrats and pro-choicers, the confusion is even greater. Poll after poll shows them unclear on McCain's positions....McCain's maverick reputation and his calculated political meanderings on choice add up to one thing: The public thinks McCain just might be a moderate on abortion.
The widespread belief that John McCain is a moderate on abortion is dangerously wrong.
His mavericky reputation and the calculated confusion over his actual position on abortion are significant factors in keeping his campaign as successful as it has been. Up to half the women supporting McCain are pro-choice, and more than 70% of pro-choice McCain supporters don't yet realize he is a foe of Roe v. Wade, and furthermore does not agree with mainstream views on related issues like contraception. According to the head of Planned Parenthood in McCain's Arizona congressional district, who has felt the full force of his wrath on the issue, he will be worse on issues related to women's reproductive freedom than even George W. Bush. And others who've dealt with him on the issue over his "two-and-a-half-decade-long perfectly anti-abortion voting record" agree.
Since his first bid for the presidency in 1999, Mr. Straight Talk has veered all over the map on the abortion issue. Many voters still believe the ideologically moderate McCain of 2000 is the true McCain and that his current position ("John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench") is simply a pander to the hard right.
But, in truth, it was his 2000 position on abortion that was the outlier--a short-lived attempt to court the center after George W. Bush had locked up the religious right's support. McCain is not, and never was, a moderate.
During his political career, McCain has participated in 130 reproductive health-related votes on Capitol Hill; of these, he voted with the anti-abortion camp in 125. McCain has consistently backed rights for the unborn, voting to cover fetuses under the State Children's Health Insurance Program and supporting the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which allowed a "child in utero" to be recognized as a legal victim of a crime. He has voted in favor of the global gag rule, which prevents U.S. funds from going to international family-planning clinics that use their own money to perform abortions, offer information about abortion, or take a pro-choice stand. And he has voted to appoint half a dozen anti-abortion judges to the federal bench, as well as Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. During the Bork hearings, McCain attacked the Court's creation of a right to privacy in Roe v. Wade: "Whether one is pro-or anti-abortion," McCain said in an October 1987 hearing, "it is difficult to argue that the Court's opinion is not constitutionally suspect."
Some of these votes were, politically speaking, no-brainers for anyone vaguely in the pro-life camp. But McCain also joined efforts supported only by the radical wing of his party. He voted, for instance, with only one-fifth of the Senate to remove family-planning grants from a 1988 spending bill and with only 18 senators that same year against allowing Medicaid to pay for abortions in cases of rape or incest.
In 1994, the year after abortion provider David Gunn was killed outside a Florida clinic, McCain voted with 29 members of the Senate against establishing penalties for violent or threatening interference outside abortion clinics. Many solidly pro-life Republicans--Mitch McConnell, Kit Bond, John Danforth--voted in favor of the bill, called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE)...."There were a number of very anti-choice senators who voted for FACE...and [McCain] wasn't one of them." Instead, McCain joined senators like Orrin Hatch and Jesse Helms in opposition.
Conservative writer Charlotte Allen summarized McCain's congressional career well last year in The Weekly Standard, noting, "[He] has never failed to cast his vote in favor of whatever abortion restrictions are arguably permitted under Roe v. Wade: bans against partial-birth abortion, abortions on military bases, transporting minors across state lines to obtain abortions behind their parents' backs, and government funding for abortion both in the United States and abroad. ... In addition, McCain has voted to confirm every 'strict constructionist' judge ... appointed by the various Republican presidents who have served during his tenure." And, she added, "Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America...consistently award him ratings of absolute zero on their scorecards."
And for those who harbor the idea that McCain personally may favor the idea that women should make their own choices rather than having the government make their reproductive choices for them, his long-time friends and associates say that his current hard pro-life position isn't a matter of political expediency but his true and deeply held belief. His support for embryonic stem cell research has been the only blight on his perfect pro-life record.
People who know him say that his support was a response to watching his friend and mentor Representative Morris Udall suffer from Parkinson's and that he believed his position was entirely consistent with his pro-life view.
So why hasn't his rigid anti-abortion stance registered with the public? Partly it's because of the deliberately moderate positions he took in 2000 and partly it's because he doesn't speak on the topic with the fervor of other hard-right ideologues. His embarrassed stammering over the Viagra-versus-birth-control issue last month, for example, or his ignorance on the issue of contraceptives and the spread of HIV, could lead people to think, mistakenly, that his ignorance would translate to less than fervent action. But that would be wrong.
McCain may or may not truly understand the broader definition of "pro-life," which these days also includes opposition to traditional and emergency contraception, family-planning, euthanasia, and related federal funding both here and abroad.
But, as on abortion, both data and anecdote show there is little latitude in his positions. He has voted to end the Title X family-planning program, which pays for everything from birth control to breast cancer screenings and which is a target for the right because the recipients of these dollars also tend to be clinics that offer contraception to unwed and underage women and that offer abortions. He has backed largely discredited abstinence-only education, voting in 1996 to take $75 million from the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant to establish such a program; ten years later, he voted against teen-pregnancy prevention programs. He has supported parental notification laws governing not only abortion but contraception for teens, and, though he didn't want to talk to the press about it, he's voted against requiring insurance companies to cover birth control. In international family affairs, McCain has voted not only in favor of the global gag rule, but also to defund the United Nations group that provides family-planning services (not abortions) for poor women, and to spend a third of overseas HIV/AIDS prevention funds on abstinence education.
Moreover, say advocates, he is not open to dialogue. "Whether it's abortion care, birth control, or comprehensive sex education, McCain is not moderate or a maverick," says Donna Crane, policy director of NARAL Pro-Choice America and a key lobbyist on these questions. "We never ask--and we never hear pro-choice Republicans question--whether McCain will be with us on a vote. He's always on the wrong side."
McCain needs to be forced to own his positions on these issues. He should not be allowed to hide behind his previous moderate pandering and the broad public confusion over his personal stance on reproductive freedom issues. The traditional media and the Obama campaign both need to press him to reveal his true out-of-the-mainstream, anti-choice, anti-woman positions on this issue.