Buh-Bye

Wow. The Republican presidential field is coming totally unglued, and all over good old abortion. Tomorrow Rudy Giuliani is going to start making a series of coordinated appearances announcing his support for Roe, and testing the notion that you have to be anti-abortion to get the Republican nomination. This is so exciting that it totally wiped Mitt Romney's wife's donations to Planned Parenthood right off the blogs.

I'd have said, before this abortion thing blew up, that Giuliani had a very decent shot at getting the Republican nomination, and a great shot at winning a general election, entirely because most Americans know one thing about him (9/11), and are not ever going to find out anything else, facts including but not limited to: a) that one thing isn't even really true (like, putting his command center in the WTC was against policy and really bloody stupid), and b) he's a megalomaniacal authoritarian nutbag.

But I think they're going to be hearing about this abortion business, because it's just so incredibly novel -- a Republican who's pro-choice! Who doesn't want to hear about that? Paradoxically, of course, this fact almost certainly makes Giuliani dead in the water for the primaries, and yet more electable in the general. But it's hard to parse, I think. I absolutely would not under any circumstances vote for a forced pregnancy candidate for president. How many Republicans feel the same?

The Times, reporting on this story, includes the following statistics:

In a New York Times/CBS News poll in March, 41 percent of Republicans thought abortions should be prohibited, compared with 23 percent of Americans in general; in addition, 53 percent of Republicans said they wanted a Republican presidential nominee who would make abortions more difficult to get.

I find those numbers somewhat surprising; don't they imply that 59% of Republicans would support a candidate who would back parental consent laws, etc, while keeping abortion legal?

I suppose the conventional wisdom is that only the rabid base turn out for primaries, and so that 59% isn't relevant. Or, that that insane 41% is sufficient to ruin a primary bid, although maybe not given the Republican winner-takes-all primary system (for discussion of the ins and outs of this, see Matt Yglesias). You do wonder though whether this is right; how many Republicans really vote on this issue. For instance, I suspect the lack of discussion of abortion among the left's candidates has less to do with Democratic small-tent politics than it does with the fact that, as that 77% of pro-at-least-some-choice Americans indicates, it's increasingly only crackpots who oppose all abortions. Well, crackpots, the President, half of congress, and four ninths of the Supreme Court. All of whom were, directly or indirectly, the work of the base.

Right. See ya, Rudy. Don't let the screen door hit ya where the good lord split ya.