Jimmy Carter: Old News and New
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the former President Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan. On the one hand, it is hard to believe it has been that long. On the other, I’m old enough to remember only the tail end of the Reagan years, and I’m sure many ITA readers can barely remember Reagan at all. If you look at the timeline, Reagan’s election now stands closer to JFK’s election than to the present day. Time flies.
But former President Carter is still making headlines. At a recent breakfast in Washington, D.C., Carter in not-so-many-words came out as pro-life on abortion. Carter said, “I never have felt that any abortion should be committed — I think each abortion is the result of a series of errors,” and “I’ve never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion.” He also criticized his fellow Democrats for being too rigid in their support of abortion rights, because taking the hard line alienates moderates and the religious from the party. “I have always thought it was not in the mainstream of the American public to be extremely liberal on many issues,” Carter said. “I think our party’s leaders — some of them — are overemphasizing the abortion issue.”
I’ve long believed that the GOP is more tolerant of its pro-choice members (Giuliani, Rice, Schwarzenegger, Powell, etc.) than the Democrats are of their pro-life members. That may be just because where I’m from (New Jersey), most Republicans ARE pro-choice. We’ll see if the Democratic party leadership has any response to one of its elder statesmen calling out the party on the abortion issue.
7 Responses to “Jimmy Carter: Old News and New”
I think you will probably find that the Democratic party, while liking the good PR that Carter’s charitable efforts give them, does not listen to Carter when it comes to their policies or direction.
They instead choose to listen to Clinton and others who they see as more “in touch” with the direction of the party.
The funny thing is, if folks had listened to some of Carter’s ideas about locating and backing research into alternative energy sources, we may not be seeing the problems with gas prices that we have now.
Pro-choice Republicans are not accepted very much at all within the Oklahoma Republican party. It’s Constitution seems to recommend withholding endorsement of any nominee who is pro-choice. Some Republicans switched to the Democratic party because of what they considered undue harassment for their stand.
The TN GOP is pretty much like the OK one, it sounds like.
Now, it is surely worth noting that there are exceedingly few pro-choice Republicans with a national profile who have any say whatsoever on domestic policy –Specter is pretty much the beginning and the ending of that list, and he had a nasty primary fight last time around because of it. If Giuliani ever does try to run for prez, he’ll either have to backpedal like a maniac, or get pounded in the primaries.
On the other hand, the highest ranking Democrat in the federal government (Sen. Reid) is pro-life.
So, I don’t think the Dems will have any particular problem accepting Pres. Carter’s statements.
Reid is pro-life? I have never heard anything about his opinion on abortion, but I do wonder where you heard that.
Goodness, Karl, it was all over the news & blogosphere when he rose to minority leader. Just google “Reid pro-life” and you’ll see plenty of hits. Here’s one on his voting record:
http://www.issues2000.org/Social/Harry_Reid_Abortion.htm
and his 29% issue rating from NARAL.
Here’s another, from FOX:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138762,00.html
“As a Mormon, Reid opposes some abortion rights, the first pro-life Democratic leader since West Virginia’s Robert Byrd (search) 15 years ago.”
Of course, they go on to quote Fred Barnes calling Reid, as it were, a PLINO; I think all this is means is that he hasn’t toed the hardest of hard lines here, by which standard almost no one is ‘really’ pro-life or pro-choice. But you might want to check it out for yourself.
Maybe it isn’t necessary for him to take the “hardest of hard” lines. Do we have anything suggesting that he favors making abortion more illegal than not? Otherwise, I don’t know how it would be different from “pro-choice.” This would probably not be revealed in his voting record, since Congress just doesn’t vote on significant abortion bans (because Roe v. Wade wouldn’t allow it), but unless we have other evidence that he would favor more significant restrictions than this, I don’t think we can assume that he is pro-life, even if Fox News applies that label to him.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/03/20/congress.abortion.02/index.html
There’s plenty of other links than the FOX one that shows him to be opposed to abortion; and I think we have every reason to think that, if it were simply up to him, he’d make it illegal. But he also recognizes that, if he wants to be a leader in his party, he can’t take them somewhere they overwhelmingly don’t want to go. Also, he’s smart enough to recognize that some symbolic ‘pro-life’ measures, like the global gag rule, are really more effectively anti-life than anything else, doing little to actual prevent abortions and indeed in effect raising the number of abortions that will occur (because it effectively blocks funding for other family-planning programs as well).
Now, surely his low score from NARAL, including voting against partial-birth abortion, is very significant evidence beyond just the FOX label — unless you think that we just can’t have any evidence whatsoever of a Congressperson’s pro-life/pro-choice stance, since none of the votes ‘really’ count. We have no reason to doubt his sincere expression of his religious faith, and his sincere expression that that is what leads him personally to be opposed to abortion. He’ll vote regularly to put various restrictions on abortion rights, and he was happy to feed Bush a SCOTUS list with many pro-life judges on it (including Miers, who we all know darn well is pro-life). He self-identifies as pro-life, and isn’t ashamed to do so. He’s just not going to try to take his party there with him, because he knows that’s just not possible.