| Monday, October 31, 2005 |
| Take the "A" train |
Bush took the easy way out of his political mess by responding to the base's commands and nominating Alito. Democrats shouldn't take the knee-jerk route by responding predictably. C'mon, guys, we're dealing with a weakened, has-been president here, not Ronald freaking Reagan. George W. Bush is so yesterday -- let's focus on 2006; on pulling together a strong message (or any message at all at this point), and on uniting the country behind the idea of new leadership in Washington. The Supreme Court will be fine. Even if by some miracle Alito helps overturn Roe (which I doubt), moderates have long since won the battle over abortion rights, and the states will cancel them at their peril (rather, at Republicans' peril). The left has (in many ways unfortunately) long since won the culture wars (have you watched MTV lately? I haven't, because I can't do so with my kids in the room...). So take a deep breath. Let Dubya have his nominee. It's pretty much all he's going to get.
Related Armando at the Daily Kos manages to miss Bill Clinton's point entirely. The point isn't to fight everything and anything, just for the sake of looking tough, it's to fight smart...
Update: What Bill Clinton said on abortion:
He said Democrats too often aren't willing to talk about abortion because they're afraid of virulent reactions from anti-abortion groups.
But the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle, agreeing that abortion is a tragedy but not wanting "to go back to the days when we criminalized the conduct of scared young girls and their doctors," he said.
"So how come we can't talk about it?" he added. "Because we basically let political ads turn every player in this drama into a two-dimensional cartoon instead of a three-dimensional person." That doesn't sound like a call to arms to abandon the mushy middle to me, it sounds like an appeal to Democrats to embrace the majority.
Update 2: Time has More on Alito ... Don't call him "Scalito" -- at least, not to his face...
Tags: Supreme Court, Politics, SCOTUS, Law, News, Bush |
posted by JReid @ 4:03 PM   |
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