SDG here (not Jimmy).
This weekend John McCain and Barack Obama were each interviewed by that Purpose Driven Life guy.
I watched about ninety seconds of Obama before I had to read to my kids, and later I watched, I don’t know, maybe ten minutes of McCain before getting involved in something else.
At any rate, I saw enough of McCain to cheer his straight response on when life should be protected ("At the moment of conception") and his citation of his 25-year pro-life record — and again when he responded equally bluntly about Supreme Court nominees, an issue McCain himself explicitly connected to the abortion issue.
On that last point, asked which Supreme Court justices he wouldn’t have nominated, McCain named ("with all due respect") all four bad guys, and went on to emphasize the President’s responsibility to nominate justices committed to sticking to the Constitution rather than "legislating from the bench," a phrase he used twice in describing "some of the worst damage" done by justices.
He couldn’t have given a much better answer than that. And with Supreme Court nominations in the very top echelon of my concerns in this election — and my complete confidence in Obama’s ability and commitment to put forward nominees every bit as activist/evil as the likely retirees, if not more so — that’s something I really needed to hear from him.
So why — how — is McCain teetering on losing my vote?
Because he’s been sending signals that he may pick a pro-choice running mate.
If he does that, I absolutely will not vote for him. Period. I can understand others feeling differently, but that’s how I see it.
Why?
(First, a BIG RED DISCLAIMER: This post represents my thoughts, not Jimmy’s. I don’t know how Jimmy will be voting or how this issue will affect his vote.)
My feeling is that I’d rather see the GOP go down in flames, even if that means President Obama for four or even eight years, and let the GOP try to get it right next time. I’d rather throw away my vote on some hopeless third pro-life candidate, so that when the GOP leadership and party advisers wake up the morning after the election and sees the margin they lost by, and then look at the votes sucked away by that third-party spoiler, they’ll be more likely next time to do what’s necessary to get that margin back. (It’s still important to vote, even for a guy who can’t win, so that the party can see the votes they didn’t get, and understand why.)
If McCain is elected President, his vice president will be well positioned to succeed him as the party’s next presidential candidate (which could easily happen only four years from now). This time around we fended off a White House bid from pro-choice Rudy Giuliani, but Giuliani made tactical mistakes, and for awhile he looked like a credible contender. Anyway, Giuliani was only America’s Mayor. Vice-President Ridge could be a much tougher nut to crack.
If McCain picks a pro-choice running mate, his 25-year pro-life doesn’t mean squat: He’s not committed to the pro-life cause. If he’s going to position a pro-choice Republican for a White House run, he’s setting up the GOP to degrade its pro-life stance from merely nominal to strictly optional. Every president, especially every successful president, leaves his stamp on the party for years after he leaves office. The Democratic Party is still very substantially what Clinton made it, and the Bush 41/43 influence will continue to be felt in the GOP for years to come.
There are a lot of things I’m not happy about in the GOP. There are a few key issues — this is one, though not the only one — that have kept me voting GOP most of the time for most of my life. I can’t cast a vote that may eventually result in a pro-choice presidential GOP ticket.
Now, maybe McCain is just making noises about being undecided because he’s trying to win "undecided" voters by appearing moderate and creating the impression that he doesn’t have a pro-life litmus test. Maybe he’s going to pick a pro-life running mate after all, but wants it to seem that, whoever it ultimately is, he sort of happens to be pro-life, rather than making it clear that he’s excluding pro-choice possibilities from the outset.
If so, it’s a bad strategy. McCain isn’t going to beat Obama by rushing to the middle. He needs to shore up his base. If McCain or the GOP thinks that the base is so frightened of Obama that they’ll vote for him no matter what, he’s sadly mistaken.