Today In Yoosta-Bee Concern Trolling

Shorter William Daley: The Democratic coalition needs to be big enough to encompass legislators who oppose every significant item on a moderately progressive agenda, or the party is doomed.

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Wallis: Wrong on the Policy, Wrong on the Politics

It's hard to even know where to begin with what is -- despite some hemming and hawing about "both sides" being at fault that always seems to end up with the pro-choice majority being at fault -- a rousing defense of the Stupak Amendment. [HT, I think, to Dr. Black.] First, on the policy, welcome to non-sequitur theater:

The now-famous Stupak amendment is clearly closer to the pro-life community's understanding of what "neutrality" means than the pro-choice community's. But it is clearly not the caricature it is now being made into by the losing side of the vote, some of whom are now referring to it as "the coat hanger amendment" suggesting that it is designed to push women into back alleys again for illegal abortions by denying them access to legal abortion; it certainly is not.

What it does do is exclude health-care plans in the public option from covering elective abortions; it also disallows any public subsidies from being used for plans in the new exchange which offer elective abortions.

Um, what? I hate to break this to Wallis, but the thing about denying people the money to pay for things is that it denies them access to them if they lack the resources. This is true of his beloved Hyde Amendment, and this is true in a more limited way of the Stupak Amendment. The latter denies women access to legal abortion if they have to buy insurance and couldn't do so without the subsidies. That's why people opposed to abortion rights favor them. You would think that a progressive "pro-lifer" would care that abortion access is being selectively denied for a class of relatively powerless women, but of course Wallis doesn't seem to care at all about such inequities. At any rate, Wallis' argument is like saying that if welfare was abolished, it wouldn't deny many poor people access to adequate sustenance; it would just prevent them from using public money to purchase food. Unless we've suddenly entered a world in which all women have solid middle-class incomes without me noticing, it's a distinction without a difference.

On the politics, he gives the same line anti-choicers fed a credulous Amy Sullivan:

But somewhere along the line, the process broke down. Instead of building on the initial common ground of neutrality and bringing both sides together to hammer out compromises, many pro-life Democrats felt excluded from the conversation about how abortion would be addressed in the bill. Ultimately, they felt they were presented with a final "compromise" on abortion drafted by a predominantly pro-choice committee. Although the Capps Amendment was meant as a good faith effort to find common ground, it was drafted and finalized without enough substantive input from the pro-life community, and it failed to address many pro-life concerns. (In several situations, it even made things worse instead of better.)

So, in other words, 1)opponents of reproductive freedom injected abortion into a debate about health care, 2)the part of the Democratic Party that actually represents the party's core values made some compromises try to get health care passed, and 3)the minority of the party that opposes the party's core principles decided to hold health care hostage until they got the odious language they wanted. And this shows that...pro-choicers injected abortion politics into the health care debate and don't really care about health care reform (because they only way to really care about health care reform is to ensure that it doesn't cover crucial medical procedures for women that Jim Wallis finds icky.) Sure.

Look, I'll make this simple. It was opponents of abortion rights, not supporters, who decided to risk health care reform by introducing a wedge issue. (Note that the leadership didn't try to use health care reform to pursue the salutary goal of getting rid of the Hyde Amendment.) It was Stupak et al. that couldn't abide a bill written by a leadership that actually trued to represent the values of the vast majority of the party and threatened to take their balls and go home. If it fails, it's on them, end of story.

I suppose it should also go without saying that Wallis is also a major proponent of the idea that Democrats could court opponents of abortion rights without any substantive risks. I guess this is the end of that! Although since he seems to define restrictions on access to abortion as not actually being restrictions, maybe he'll keep saying it...

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Concern Trolling at its Finest

While most conservatives would be outraged if Barack Obama managed to win a blueberry pie at a 4H raffle, others would simply mutter and cluck their tongues out of feigned concern that he really didn't need that pie, and besides, the people who made the pie aren't that special, and -- what's more -- somebody, somewhere will someday make fun of the president because he couldn't eat the entire pie on his own.

It's in that dim spirit that Ross Douthat thinks the President would have done the world an enormous favor by rejecting the Nobel Prize the other day. Aside from showing a bizarre lack of familiarity with the nicknames that George Bush acquired in office, Douthat is confusing me terribly. On the one hand, the award is the supposed to be the cross-eyed offspring of "a committee of five obscure Norwegians" whose opinions matter to no one at all -- especially not "to the Europeans or the Africans, to Moscow or Beijing, or to any other population or great power" that Americans should care about or fear. And so as far as Douthat sees it, the Nobel is about as meaningful as a Father's Day card declaring him to be "Number One Dad," since everyone knows he's not actually the Number One Dad on the planet.

On the other hand, Douthat insists that Obama's award is so improper that the world will froth over with rage when it realizes that any number of other people could have received it instead. Because he's so obviously unsuited for the honor, Obama will discover that "failure, if and when it comes, [is] that much more embarrassing and difficult to bear" (which is, to be fair, precisely the sort of dilemma you'd bear in mind mind if you'd been handed a jizz mop and told to go clean up the mess Bill Kristol had made in the corner booth.) But the idea that the Nobel is going to provide Obama's critics with further ammunition seems weirdly far-fetched. If we assume the award was a nod of approval for the steps taken by the Obama administration after eight years of universal horror, it's not hard to imagine the reaction of conservatives if Obama had received the Nobel after several years of "actual accomplishment." They'd be whining about how he failed to develop missile defense for Europeans who didn't actually want it; they'd be howling about his Chamberlain-esque naivete in refusing to set Iran ablaze; there would be the predictable bleats about "selling out" right-wing Israelis; and we'd have to listen to endless recitations about the virtues of "peace through strength" and how only dirty fucking hippies support the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

But since Obama's getting the award now and not later,
we'll apparently have to concede that McCain's "Celebrity" ad was spot-on!

...UPDATES [BY SL]:

• When you have the same idea Mickey Kaus had three days ago, you can be safe in assuming that it's a lemon. I assume most of our readers already understand this, but if you think that such an action wouldn't have resulted in acres of bandwidth and ink being spent on an "Obama is such an uppity narcissist he think he's too good for the Nobel Peace Prize" narrative I have some Orange County Option ARM derivatives to sell you.
  
• Daniel Davies, in comments: "Tell us more, Ross Douthat, about people who get honours that they don't deserve! I have this feeling, Ross Douthat, op-ed columnist of the New York Times, that when it comes to excessive rewards for undistinguished track records, you may know whereof you speak! I am particularly interested in Ross Douthat's theory that accepting an undeserved honour can prove embarrassing when one is unable to live up to expectations!" In fairness, he's long been known around the world as "Douthat the Incompetent"...
  

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