Swing-state women, including Oregonians, we have someone you should get to know: John McCain

A just-released Peter Hart poll (pdf) for Planned Parenthood Action Fund outlined McCain's vulnerability in 16 "battleground" states for November, including Oregon.

The vulnerability? Here's a hint: It doesn't involve sorting out whether he wants to get US troops out of Iraq in 2013 or in 2108. It doesn't involve delving into the wonkery of privatizing social security or whether health care should be mandated. It doesn't involve parsing out his statements to determine whether he actually gives a damn about climate change. It doesn't even involve neutralizing McCain's efforts to distance himself from George Bush (if not Bush's policies and his fundraising potential).

It's actually this simple: When women actually hear his record on reproductive health, they start heading for the exits in substantial numbers.

[A]s of now, McCain’s position on abortion is not understood and remains only a ripe and vulnerable potential target for voter education efforts. Half (51%) of all women in these battleground states say they do not know enough about McCain’s views on abortion to say whether he is in step or
out of step with their own outlook. This misunderstanding is acute even among McCain’s sizable audience of pro-choice women voters. In fact, about half of these pro-choice McCain voters (50% in a match-up against Obama and 52% in a match-up against Clinton) volunteer that they do not know enough to even describe McCain’s position on abortion and roughly another one in four (23% in either contest) mistakenly presume that he is in step with their own views. Thus, more than seven in 10 pro-choice McCain supporters in either a McCain-Obama race (73%) or a McCain-Clinton race (75%) have yet to learn that McCain’s position on abortion is directly at odds with their own; this represents about 36% of all McCain women voters in battleground states (regardless of which Democratic candidate he faces).

And here's what happens when you provide the basics of his reproductive-health record to those 36% of McCain swing votes who aren't aware yet:

When pro-choice McCain voters are told of his true positions and actual voting record on key reproductive health issues, they express serious reservations about supporting him. In fact, many of these women voters say this information would cause them to desert McCain. After hearing that McCain has consistently voted against expanding access to preventive health care services that reduce pregnancy and the need for abortion, including votes against requiring health care plans to cover birth control and in favor of abstinence-only programs, about four in 10 pro-choice McCain voters say they are less likely to vote for him (38% in a match-up against Obama and 40% in a match-up against Clinton). When told that McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and favors making most abortions illegal, 36% of pro-choice McCain voters in a McCain-Obama race and 38% of pro-choice McCain voters in a McCain-Clinton race say they are less likely to vote for him. The simple arithmetic of these findings suggests that just filling in McCain’s actual voting record and his publicly stated positions on a handful of key issues has the potential to diminish his total vote share among battleground women voters by about 17 to 20 percentage points in either match-up.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Seventeen to 20 points is quite a potential bump from something as unsexy as voter education, isn't it?

More on this from FDL and Huffington.

He's not a maverick. He's not a moderate. He's one of the top conservative minds of the 1950s, and should be treated as such.

One more thing McCain isn't going to be straight about

Joe Conason posts this reminder (Salon Premium):

Schecter quotes an August 1999 speech that McCain delivered to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco:

"I'd love to see a point where [Roe v. Wade] is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force x number of women to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."

Then he flashes forward to 2006, as McCain prepared for this year's presidential race, when the senator declared that he does not merely favor overturning Roe, but supports a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion in almost all circumstances. Schecter provides another quote, from a McCain appearance last year on "Meet the Press," when he claimed that he has "always been pro-life, unchanging and unwavering." Except when he wavered and changed, of course.

It is possible that McCain feels differently about choice now than he did 10 years ago, and not only because his new stance is more convenient for a candidate who needs conservative votes. Perhaps he honestly cares about reducing the number of abortions. If so, he might want to encourage broad access to contraception and sex education, since he probably remembers what young people tend to do (and what he tended to do as often as possible when he was young and not so young).

On these issues McCain might, in other words, think for himself. Instead he merely parrots the extremists of the far right, who vainly hope to prevent sex but in fact promote teenage pregnancy -- and abortion as well as sexually transmitted disease -- by blocking contraception and sex education. He simply doesn't care about the toxic effect of these policies on young women. He prefers mindless posturing to thoughtful policymaking, as he demonstrated a year ago when he fumbled reporters' questions about condoms, contraception and AIDS, both in Africa and the United States, in a series of startling exchanges on his campaign bus.

(Emphasis added.)

Crass political expediency obviously goes a long way toward explaining McCain's flip-flops on reproductive freedom. Here's another possibility:

Dean added, however, that in recent DNC-sponsored focus groups designed to gauge voter opinions about McCain, participants regularly brought up the Arizona Senator's age as a potential point of concern.

Those worries fell into two main categories, Dean said. The first was a "health concern"; the second was the idea that McCain has "very old fashioned" opinions on a variety of topics. As evidence, Dean cited a focus group of conservative women in Charleston, West Virginia. When the Democratic organizers of the group told participants that McCain opposed insurance coverage for birth control pills and supported abstinence-only education in schools, they reportedly said "this guy is out of step with what modern views are."

(Emphasis added.)

Adds a little extra punch to the phrase "vote as if your life depended on it," doesn't it? (As if it needed it.)

Planned Parenthood spells out McCain's record

No need to wait on Obama and Clinton to settle things before we start bringing it to McCain.

Planned Parenthood has launched this ad on McCain's record on women's choice:

Despite his reputation--ginned up by a smitten political press corps--as a "maverick," McCain has a zero percent rating by both Planned Parenthood and NARAL. Folks, you can't fall in line much more than a zero percent rating from your opponents.

As evidence (not that any more was needed) of where McCain really stands with his base on this, consider that pundits predicted that a 60-second radio ad by Planned Parenthood, run during the "Potomac Primaries" earlier this week, would actually help McCain by reassuring his pro-pregnancy base that he's with them.

Sic transit Rudy

Despite seeming all but inevitable mere weeks ago, the Giuliani presidential campaign has yielded to the apparently inescapable truth that in America at large, just as in New York City, the more voters got to know Rudy the less they liked him.

Enterprising journalists dove for their thesauri to find fresh synonyms for "flame-out" and "implosion" to describe the riches-to-rags conclusion of Giuliani's presidential bid while the rest of their colleagues found that, on the whole, those characterizations served just fine.

His campaign will be remembered for three things:

First, it will have the striking distinction of having had its obituary written, not once but several times, a month before it actually died.

Second, it will mark the moment when a substantial chunk (if not the majority) of the current Republican Party, only two years ago snot-flinging drunk on the heady belief that it would enjoy permanent majority status for the next forty years, showed the world that it would rather be far-right than elect a president. On the left, the conventional wisdom during 2007 was that Republican voters would look past his record of insufficient support for homophobes and forced pregnancy enthusiasts to what is essential: Rudy is a vengeful, secretive, authoritarian stone-crusher who would have quickly outdone even Bush on the dissent-suppression, economic, and military adventurism fronts.

Turns out that might not have been enough for them, without the gay-bashing and hostility to women's reproductive rights, too. (Although I do think the base was still willing to stretch a point more than most commentators allowed on the whole "thrice married" thing, perhaps because they liked the lovely Old-Testament feel of "thrice," which Rudy single-handedly returned to the journalistic lexicon.)

Third, it will -- or should be-- remembered for the moment when telegeniety firmly reasserted itself as an arbiter of electability. Quoth Lance Mannion on the danger awaiting Rudy when a national TV audience (many with HDTV) got its first good close-up look at him:

[P]eople are going to look at his long, narrow head, that high bony bald dome, the sunken eyes, the livid skin, and that toothy rictus of a grin and they're going to say, "Whoa! Who let Death in the room?"

He will frighten children.

And so, since he's polling far too low to create any mischief in the emerging McCain-Romney cage match anyway, there's no reason to delay presenting Rudy with this lovely parting gift--an official p3 "Good Riddance" bumper sticker--and quickly ushering him off the right (but not right enough) side of the stage.

Save the blastocysts!

Molly Ivins famously wrote:

Good thing we've still got politics in Texas -- finest form of free entertainment ever invented.

Which brings us in short order to this item from Culturekitchen:

Under [Texas State Sen. Dan] Patrick's SB 1567, AKA the Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007, women would qualify for a $500 payment from the state within 60 days of signing away all parental rights to their newborn children.

If Patrick gets his way, childbearing in the service of the state won't be just creepy Handmaid's Tale fiction anymore. How's that for some moral family values?

I passed this story on to longtime p3 correspondent James the Elder, a man with an on-again-off-again relationship to the great state of Texas himself, who wrote back, "Molly made a living laughing at them. Fighting them but laughing mostly. Can you imagine the column this would have generated?"

JtE is right, of course. And this was the second conversation I'd had today about the big Molly-shaped gap left in the world these days.

Still, it's not like the slack isn't being picked up out there. The grinning redhead has fallen, but (among others) the General continues to probe the weaknesses of the right with his bayonet.

Quoting only a part would be hopeless; just go read the whole thing. And ponder this point: If the General is right, perhaps that's why they call it the Lone Star State?