Yesterday the blogosphere was full of talk about Unity ’08, a nascent third-party effort with a twist: the idea is to build a party online, agree on an agenda, draft candidates to run for president and vice president in 2008, and then get them on the ballot across the country.I found the talk especially interesting because two ol’ pols from my home state of Georgia, Ham Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon (both veterans of the Carter presidential campaigns) are in the forefront of the effort, along with Hotline founder Doug Bailey and former independent governor of Maine, Angus King. My old boss Sam Nunn is being mentioned as a possible candidate (don’t hold your breath, folks; Nunn’s got bigger fish to fry, like saving us all from loose nukes).My colleague The Moose hailed the effort but warned it would have a hard time overcoming the various institutional barriers to a third party. Over at Daily Kos, diarist Redshift notes that Unity ’08’s “crucial issues” list looks a lot like that of Democrats.My reaction was a little different: third-party efforts that begin with the concept of an agenda and the idea of a candidate tend to take its promoters through the looking glass in pursuit of White Rabbits they can never quite catch. Some of you may remember a similar effort back in 1995-96, organized by a group of former elected officials dubbed “the secret seven” (Bill Bradley, Dick Lamm, Tim Penney, Lowell Weicker, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart and the self-same Angus King). Their deal was to promote “intergenerational equity,” a bit of a code word for entitlement reform, and the press got all excited by the possibility that the group would run one of its number for president as a third-party candidate in 1996.By a pure coincidence, I was moderating a panel at the Minnesota conference where Lamm, Tsongas and Penney showed up with the promise to reveal the “secret seven’s” plans. After much hype, the three did a long presentation on the budget and entitlement spending, admitted they had no plans for a candidacy, and then basically disappeared from view as the horse-race-deprived political media lost interest. My advice to the Unity ’08 crew is that they better get some serious candidate possibilities out there to define their effort and make sure their interactive agenda-building initiative doesn’t become a freak magnet. Otherwise, they’ll be chasing White Rabbits until their potential constituency disappears through the looking glass.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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February 1: RNC Scolds Republican Pols For Cowardice on Abortion
The backlash to the Supreme Court’s abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights is having some interesting new consequences, as I explained this week at New York:
For decades, the Republican National Committee has staked out a hard-core anti-abortion position. So now that a Republican-controlled Supreme Court has abolished the federal constitutional right to an abortion, you’d figure the RNC would take a moment to relish its victory. But you’d be wrong.
Instead, the RNC is lashing out at apostates. In response to 2022 Republican candidates avoiding the topic of abortion and to signs of strife in the party’s alliance with the anti-abortion movement, the RNC has passed a resolution scolding its members and urging them to keep the faith. It concludes with marching orders:
“WHEREAS, The Democratic Party and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the issue of abortion during the 2022 midterms, concealing their extremism while mischaracterizing and vilifying pro-life Republican candidates; and
“WHEREAS, Instead of fighting back and exposing Democratic extremism on abortion, many Republican candidates failed to remind Americans of our proud heritage of challenging slavery, segregation, and the forces eroding the family and the sanctity of human life, thereby allowing Democrats to define our longtime position; therefore, be it
“RESOLVED, The Republican National Committee urges all Republican pro-life candidates, consultants, and other national Republican Political Action Committees to remember this proud heritage, go on offense in the 2024 election cycle, and expose the Democrats’ extreme position of supporting abortion on-demand up until the moment of birth, paid for by the taxpayers, even supporting discriminatory abortions such as gender selection or when the child has been diagnosed with Down syndrome.”
In states where Republicans have the power to set abortion policy, the RNC doesn’t want any namby-pamby compromises allowing the majority of abortions to proceed (despite its characterization of Democrats as the real “extremists”):
“RESOLVED, The Republican National Committee urges Republican lawmakers in state legislatures and in Congress to pass the strongest pro-life legislation possible — such as laws that acknowledge the beating hearts and experiences of pain in the unborn — underscoring the new relics of barbarism the Democratic Party represents as we approach the 2024 cycle.”
If you aren’t familiar with the rhetorical stylings of the anti-abortion movement, the “relics of barbarism” business is an effort to tie legalized abortion to the slavery and polygamy condemned by the original Republicans of the 19th century (who would probably view today’s race-baiting GOP with a jaundiced eye). The “beating heart” reference is an endorsement of “heartbeat” bills banning abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable, roughly at six weeks of pregnancy or before many women even know they’re pregnant.
The resolution is really the announcement of a new hunt for RINOs on the topic of abortion. Some in the RNC worry that their politicians will become squishy on reproductive rights because their constituents (and many swing voters) don’t favor abortion bans and regret the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, as shown by 2022’s pro-choice winning streak on ballot measures and general Republican underperformance. This pushback by the RNC parallels the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to make extreme abortion positions (such as a national abortion ban) a litmus test in the 2024 Republican primaries, especially at the presidential level.
Will this counterattack stem the panicky retreat of Republican politicians who care more about winning elections and cutting taxes than “saving the babies,” as the anti-abortion activists would put it? I don’t know. But at this point, it’s another sign that the Dobbs decision wasn’t quite the clear-cut victory for the forced-birth lobby that it initially appeared to be.