Milling around the media room after the Saddleback Forum, I learned that while John McCain was onstage talking with Rick Warren, Barack Obama was sitting down backstage to an interview with David Brody of CBN News. Brody took the opportunity to press Obama on the issue of his record of opposition to legally protecting babies who are born alive after an abortion.
Obama became visibly irritated and replied to Brody:
“I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying.”
Interesting choice of words. A little projection maybe?
Perhaps Obama had lying about abortion policy on his mind since he himself had just provided a particularly blatant example. Astonishingly, during his reply to Warren’s question about abortion, Obama made the assertion that “over the last eight years,” under the Bush administration, “abortions have not gone down.”
In actual fact, according to data released by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute in January of this year, the abortion rate has fallen dramatically and is as low as it has been since 1974. The absolute number of abortions has also fallen to 1.2 million per year, a decline of 25 percent since a high in 1990.
As the old saying goes, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. And Obama is clearly trying to work up a good story as his extremist abortion position continues to come under scrutiny.
Well, of course he is. . . so why is garden-variety mendacity from a presidential candidate remarkable? The first reason is because this particular fib is more than just a throwaway line; it’s a pointer toward his latest positioning on abortion. And his use of this new messaging at Saddleback this weekend is an illustration of his very deliberate attempt to craft an abortion message that appeals to nominally pro-life church attendees.
The Democrats are road-testing a reworking of the Clintonian theme: safe, legal, and rare. The new version isn’t packaged in clever phrasing, but it is calculated messaging nonetheless. Obama’s abortion spin is this hoary theme: Let’s focus on abortion reduction.
Sadly, they are trying to pour this rancid old wine into new wineskins with the assistance of Religious Left leaders like Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. In response to the news released last week that the Democratic platform had been “improved” to include language extolling the “choice” of motherhood, Wallis
cheered this “significant step forward.” Wallis argues there, and in many
other outlets, that the abortion- reduction strategy is the way to find common ground.
Demonstrating a jaw-dropping moral obtuseness for a religious leader, Wallis concludes that the new language hailing maternity in the Democratic platform “will help make room for people, especially in the religious community, who have strong moral convictions about abortion.”
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