Palin A 'Galvanizing Force' For Antiabortion Rights Republican Voters, Opinion Piece Says

Main Category: Abortion
Article Date: 21 Oct 2008 - 9:00 PDT

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Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin's (Alaska) opposition to abortion in all cases, as well her belief that life begins at conception, make her a "genuine true believer" for single-issue antiabortion Republican voters, Cynthia Gorney, a professor at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, writes in a New York Times Magazine opinion piece. According to Gorney, "In the right-to-life trenches, the state lobbying and volunteer offices a long way from Washington," Palin's spot on the Republican ticket "has been the great galvanizing force of the November elections." Palin's position "distinguishes" her from many politicians, including President Bush and Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), "whose records make them look antiabortion while their hearts don't seem to be in it," Gorney writes. She adds, "If that makes Palin 'extreme,' according to the view from the trenches, fine -- about time a pro-life candidate stood up and made it clear that keeping any abortion legal blows up the central right-to-life premise."

Palin's presence on the ticket thus creates a conundrum for Republican strategists, according to Gorney. Although the ticket "deeply needs" single-issue antiabortion voters, "it simultaneously needs people not to look too closely in that direction" because Palin's position "is at odds with every large-scale abortion poll ever taken in this country, since before Roe v. Wade: Americans don't like unrestricted access, but they do want legal early abortion and lots of 'exceptions.'" She continues, "So the prudent Republican thing to do is to hope for no thoughtful conversation on the topic at all." Gorney concludes that "maybe if somebody would just let [Palin] talk to us about all this for a while, settle in for a good long discourse about women's options and criminal law and the moment when life begins, then the bellicose rhetoric of her final weeks on the campaign trail might yield, for an hour or so, to something the governor of Alaska sounds as if she truly believes" (Gorney, New York Times Magazine, 10/19).

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