The Supreme Court’s recent murder of Roe v. Wade re-revealed two ugly truths that most Democrats have long chosen to ignore: First, that the party’s centrist leadership has always been ambivalent about abortion. And second, that they see activists as pests to be patronized and stereotyped.
During the 2008 campaign, then Senator Barack Obama had promised Planned Parenthood that he would codify Roe v. Wade on day one. “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Of course, he didn’t. And when later asked why it had dropped by the wayside, he replied that it was “not the highest legislative priority" adding, “I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.”(1)
That sobering moment is the Rosetta Stone for understanding decades of self-sabotaging centrist politics. Obama was an enormous disappointment on a host of issues, but this is not about Obama: It’s about centrist ideology, it's hostility to the Democratic base, and the absurd political behavior it fosters.
Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorite slogan that there is “no litmus test" on abortion. She says that a lot, maybe even as often as she praises Ronald Reagan.(2) In May of 2017, Pelosi paradoxically said voicing alarm on abortion access was “hurting the party”(3) even though abortion was “fading as an issue."
The key to reconciling that apparent contradiction is the centrist myth that activists are out of step with ordinary voters. Translation: It's only those whacko activists who care about it and they don't really count. Centrists have adopted a favorite conservative stereotype that ultimately insults nearly everyone else: It posits that caring is crazy and the public is lazy and/or conservative – and it's all pure projection.
It's also a tread worn excuse that polls routinely refute. Indeed, centrists seem allergic to doing anything popular whether its passing Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college, forgiving student debt, or in this instance defending abortion rights. Centrists project their own disinterest onto the electorate.
Just two months ago, Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn supported anti-choice incumbent Henry Cuellar (D-TX) against pro-choice challenger Jessica Cisneros. The incumbent carbuncle is also anti-union and pro-NRA. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that later fact sort of stood out after two recent mass shootings. Pelosi may be ambivalent about issues her party cares about, but at least she’s consistently so.(4)
Pelosi's not alone. In 2019, Biden’s freshly-minted presidential campaign had to rapidly backtrack after the backlash to their confirming that he still supported the 1976 anti-choice Hyde Amendment. It was an awfully awkward reversal since it highlighted Biden’s lengthy anti-choice record in the Senate. In 1974, he said Roe v. Wade “went too far" adding, “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” And in 1982, Biden backed a constitutional amendment that would allow states to ignore Roe v. Wade. Getting snippy with pro-choice voters in 2019 probably didn't help.
Fast forward to the current crisis: Despite decades of growing warnings, the Supreme Court’s ridiculously predictable anti-abortion ruling blindsided party leadership. They clearly did not have any sort of backup plan, good or bad. Republicans had slowly whittled away Roe bit-by-bit at the state level with a litany of restrictions designed to hamper access. It made great fundraising mailer copy, but if you mentioned this outside of that context you were somehow “hurting the party" as Pelosi put it.
Obviously, establishment Democrats got accustomed to ignoring warnings. Of course, their ingrained distain for activists made them pretty dismissive to begin with. Centrist ambivalence about abortion rights further muffled their ears. They had no backup plan because people only make plans about things they actually care about. Disinterest predictably breeds inattention and leadership considered activists to be irrelevant annoying alarmists. There's no denying any of this – the results speak for themselves.
Yet leadership knew the case was before the Court, right? They could count to nine, right? All those anti-choice state “trigger laws" were written to take effect the moment Roe got overturned weren't a clue? I could go on and on, but Elie Mystal has already ridiculed this oblivious inactivity better than I ever could.
Again, they fundraised on it, yet they didn’t plan for it. It’s simply the most cynical irresponsibility. It’s inexcusably imprudent, manipulative, and manifest political malpractice to boot.
Pelosi’s go-to response to the ruling was to read a poem. Mercifully, it was nothing from “
Progressives provided long lists of practical things Democrats could do. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dashed off a list on Twitter the day after the ruling. But the Biden Administration initially balked. As Reuters reported, “Biden and officials are concerned that more radical moves would be politically polarizing ahead of November’s midterm elections." They fear giving the GOP anything they could portray as “overreach." As if Republicans are not going to do that anyway!
Of course, conservatives have been successfully using the “overreach" narrative to terrify centrists since the 1980s. And attendant talk of “turning down the temperature" echo Obama's above “tamp down some of the anger" rhetoric for a reason – it's an unthinking reflex with centrists.
This “We don't want to inflame the Republicans" thinking is both idiotic and chronic. Republicans are already inflamed: They're always inflamed. You're absolutely delusional if you think holding back will make them hold back too. That fairytale flies in the face of all previous experience, but it is even more insane in this instance because you cannot say “abortion is on the ballot" and expect Republicans to stay home. What unmitigated idiot doesn't know this? Most centrist strategists, apparently.
Consider their conflicting logic: They argued that the bombshell abortion ruling will help us in the upcoming midterms – but only if they do little or nothing to protect women's rights in the meantime. That, they say, would backfire. It doesn’t occur to them that this strategy could possibly hurt party morale, sap voter turnout, and thus backfire. Or, if rage is sustained (which I think it will be), it doesn’t occur to them that they may get a taste of that rage for causing needless suffering. Either way, it's moronic politics.
Oh, but it gets worse – much, much worse. At the same time they're saying this, the Democratic Party is spending millions of our donation dollars to help Trumpist Republicans win their GOP primaries on the premise that they will be easier to beat in the general election. This is a variant of the disastrous Pied Piper Strategy that Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign used to ensure that she would ultimately face Trump – one of the few Republican candidates she could have possibly beaten. Well, how did that work out for us?
But set that strategic stupidity aside for a second and ask yourself how this fits in with not inflaming the Republicans. Isn't that exactly what their do-nothing strategy was supposed to avoid? That's not how you turn down the heat, so these two strategies were working at cross purposes.
Fortunately, rank and file outrage forced President Biden to finally issue an executive order doing many of the things he initially resisted. Such outside motivation is often necessary on abortion. I mentioned the Hyde Amendment before; but more recently, pressure had prevented Biden from giving a rabidly anti-abortion attorney a lifetime judgeship in Kentucky – presumably as part of a deal with Mitch McConnell.
It was a gigantic shit show. The White House had originally scheduled the nomination to be announced on June 24th, which unfortunately turned out to be the very same day that the Supreme Court had officially released their decision overturning Roe. The word “officially" is key because, once again, it was leaked almost two months before. Granted, nobody knows exactly when a decision will officially drop, but it's naïve to think anyone would forget that the leak had happened. The context was baked-in and the Court's decision was expected soon. It would've caused an enormous uproar even if the date was not so on-the-nose.
Since the timing was terrible, they accordingly postponed the announcement. The White House then tried to move the nomination forward more quietly afterwards, but found it was impossible and finally gave up. Amusingly, Rand Paul, of all people, accidentally gave Biden political cover for it in a typical fit of ego.
As I've frequently tweeted, Biden needs constant minding and cannot ever be left to his own devices.
Centrists definitely don't appreciate this pressure, but there's more to their punching left than that. It's also because they inexplicably think it helps them with the electorate. Outgoing White House Communications Director Kate Bedingdfield's reaction to the rank and file's criticism was a textbook response:
“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party."
Roll that quote around in your head for a moment. It's both shocking and normal – like when some scum bucket commits a new low. Many of the activists Bedingfield attacked are people who've been volunteering to do clinic defense for decades. They have collectively faced over four decades of shootings and bombings. They literally defend women's rights with their lives. Those heroes are who she dismissed as petulant and out of touch.
This was reflexive centrist framing. It's how they routinely trivialize activists to claim the mainstream. Of course, it was also projecting because polls show that the American mainstream is more liberal than centrists are – and of course Democrats are even more so. So it's centrists “who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party."
I'm guessing the White House did not pre-approve Bedingfield's messaging. Even so, it's a belief many centrists nurture and cherish. It lurks just below the surface, which is why its dorsal fin frequently gives it away. But you'd expect a comms professional to exercise more self-control and not frenzy so easily.
Need to see another dorsal fin? Then let's revisit Joy Ann Reid old blog scandal.
As you may recall, the MSNBC host wrote a lot of homophobic posts back in the day. When the first posts came to light Reid initially apologized, but when worse ones emerged she blamed hackers. She ultimately acknowledged there was no evidence of meddling, but still denied authorship of the blog posts.
Yet her homophobia was only the tip of the iceberg. There was a little anti-Semitism too. Also ignored by the media was how tightly her bigotry and intolerant religiosity were weaved into her centrist politics.
Much like New York Times columnist David Brooks (i.e. “the liberal's favorite conservative"), Joy Ann Reid is precisely the type of centrist who advises Democrats to jettison divisive issues. Such concern trolls pit issues against each other in a zero sum game arguing that one issue is threatening to sink all the party's other goals. As I blogged about in Brooks' case, abortion is often the target of their poisonous advice.
Well, it was also the target in Reid's case. She both italicized and boldfaced the words “sure losers" when mentioning the issues of same sex marriage and abortion. This is classic centrist strategy on display. And yet, almost nobody mentioned Reid's comments on abortion in their coverage of the story. Perhaps the centrist press shared some of her assumptions about abortion and therefore found them unnoteworthy:
Why are centrists like this? Why are they so ambivalent about abortion and other issues which are so important to their constituents? It is their job to defend these things: It's what we elect them to do.
Well, centrists want comity in
Accordingly, they've built a whole political ideology around being conflict-avoidant. They loathe any sort of controversy that could encumber or scuttle chummy deal-making with their Republican colleagues. Joe Biden’s fond recollections of negotiating with racist segregationists like Strom Thurmond illustrate this mindset. Passion often conflicts with collegial process and is therefore forever suspect to centrists.
And, of course, abortion is precisely the sort of polarizing issue they'd prefer to ignore or avoid. But you could use abortion as shorthand for all other issues that are vital to voters who compose the Democratic Party coalition. Centrists consistently consider voicing concerns to be rocking the boat.
Indeed, as I've repeatedly tweeted this year and last, it's pretty evident that centrists hoped that the issue of abortion would eventually go away on its own (i.e. fade away). That was clearly wishful thinking. And maybe many centrists even secretly hoped the Supreme Court take care of it for them. This might explain their initially tepid response to the ruling. Resignation comes easy when you don't care much to begin with.
Food for thought.
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1) It was all very on-brand for the man who had trumpeted the gullible belief that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America.” Remember that shabby fantasy that we could flatter Republicans into civility, decency, and patriotic common purpose? It takes a lot of lying by omission to make that fantasy fly. And yet, it never works, does it? It’s almost as if flattery factors less into conservative decision-making than defending and advancing their vested interests. Huh.
That was Obama’s obvious Achilles’ heel, so perhaps we shouldn’t duplicate his manifest mistakes but learn from them instead. Indeed, my last glimmer of hope for the Biden administration was the repeated assurances that the party had learned from Obama’s mistakes and understood the need to go big. And admittedly things seemed initially promising. But those old centrist habits came back.
2) In this possibly problematic tweet is a video compilation of Pelosi's lengthy history of Reagan-praising – including many instances in which she proudly boasts that she does this frequently. The problematic part is it ends in a scene from one of Reagan's old movies in which he slaps a woman. This can be read as a reminder of the overtly misogynistic world that Reagan cloaked in nostalgia, a fantasy assault on Pelosi herself, or both. The background music choice definitely emphasizes that her misplaced nostalgia is out of touch. Regardless, it proves that Pelosi praises Reagan a lot and probably should not. Indeed, Pelosi openly admits that she quotes Reagan the most. “It might come as a surprise to some of you that the president I quote most often is President Reagan,” she told the crowd. “The good humor of our president was really a tonic for the nation … the gentleman that he was.”
3) Unfortunately, the author of this 2017 article insinuated that Bernie Sanders was secretly anti-choice. The word “suggested" in the opening does a lot of heavy lifting while linking to a more nuanced piece. Both articles voiced a valid fear that abortion rights were at risk within the Democratic Party as well as the country as a whole. Although both articles also distorted some things.
First, Heath Mellow had evolved beyond his past stance on abortion and become an ally (arguably more than Tim Kaine had), so calling Mellow “anti-choice" was grossly inaccurate. Second, Bernie Sanders didn't immediately endorse Jon Ossoff because Ossoff was still a relative unknown at that point and hadn't yet asked for Sanders' endorsement. Sanders doesn't like to comment on topics he has not yet looked into, so saying he didn't know if Ossoff was a progressive or not was literal and not meant as a slight. Shoddy research and hostile assumptions have marked a lot of Sanders coverage.
Now, it's absolutely true that, on a Unity Tour with Tom Perez, Sanders was echoing the same “big tent" rhetoric that centrists routinely default to. But Sanders had stopped and Pelosi has not. Yes, those articles were written in 2017. But unlike Pelosi, Sanders had never said that abortion was “fading as an issue" or “hurting the party." The difference was already visible then and has become even starker since.
Unlike the first article, the second at least acknowledged that Sanders had a long strong pro-choice voting record (100%) and that big tent rhetoric is “third-way centrist bullshit" (which it most certainly is). It also pointed out that this centrist attitude is nothing new, citing the ambivalent Clinton Administration slogan “safe, legal, and rare” – hardly a ringing defense of women's bodily autonomy.
Speaking of the Clintons' tepid support, on the topic of late term abortions, Hillary Clinton stated in 2015, “if there's a way to structure some kind of constitutional restriction that take into account the life of the mother and her health, then I'm open to that." Imagine if Bernie Sanders had said such a thing!
It's one thing to highlight the GOP's infamous inflexibility and extremism but quite another to signal your willingness to give-in to them. Recklessly giving the right such openings is how we got “welfare reform." Similarly, we almost got Social Security cuts because Barack Obama had sought a “grand bargain" on that issue. A vocal revolt from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives had forced a reversal. Granted, the GOP getting greedy and demanding more certainly played a role. But without pressure from the left, it's certainly quite possible that Obama might have caved. He's been known to do that.
Centrist willingness to sacrifice issues and constituencies is a chronic problem. Divide and conquer is a favorite conservative tactic. With centrists at the helm, it is self-inflicted.
4) I don't want to pick on Pelosi since the shitiness is inherent to centrism at every level. In Rhode Island, the state Democratic party is is trying to stop a progressive black woman in the primary for statehouse by backing a racist Tucker Carlson fan who once wore blackface. It isn't even to protect an incumbent because the incumbent is retiring so it's an open seat. It's just to stop the progressive. That's how low they go.
5) Yes, most. At this typing, three separate polls show an decisive majority of Democrats absolutely don’t want Joe Biden to run for reelection. The first Harvard CAPS–Harris Poll survey found 71% of Democrats were against his running again. The second New York Times/Siena College poll found 64% want someone else. The third CNN poll's results were the worst for Biden. It showed 75% saying he should not run.
UPDATE: Those polls were from July of 2022. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released yesterday (02/06/23), reports that only 37% of Dems want Biden to run again. The article states this is “down from 52% in the weeks before last year’s midterm elections." Apparently, he enjoyed a brief spike then. This piece links to other similarly dismal polls as well. In addition to those I mentioned, it includes ones from NBC, ABC / Washington Post, and Economist / YouGov.
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