In a statement, Mike Huckabee says the recent comments RNC Chairman Michael Steele made about abortion "are very troubling and despite his clarification today the party stands to lose many of its members and a great deal of its support in the trenches of grassroots politics."Steele's comments didn't make much sense to me--it seemed like he didn't know what he was talking about. It sorta sounded like Sarah Palin, redux. But I have to believe that the notion that the Republicans would lose members because of statements like Steele's is silly--Steele isn't an elected official, he's not the head of the party, he's basically an administrator and spokesperson and the GOP has has had plenty of those in recent times who have been pro-choice, such as Rudy Giuliani and Condi Rice. What he said might enrage some activists, and it no doubt will, but if only Republicans worried less about keeping their activists charged up at all times and more on crafting sound policies and pitches that would appeal to the political center, both they and America would be in better shape.
I suppose the most generous reading of Steele's statements was that he supports banning abortion, but for now it's legal and it's a choice that people can make, and that even if it were banned people would still be able to procure it, but that they should not do so and should choose to give birth and then give the child up for adoption. Perhaps he even supports the Republicans' potemkin "let's send it back to the states" solution, which I don't believe for a second, because if pro-lifers ever make up a majority of the Supreme Court they will ban abortion as absolutely as it is legal now. There's a reason they support the Human Life Amendment, folks, and any conservative commitment to "federalism" ended with the massive statism of George W. Bush, who evidently thought that it would be okay to raid medical marijuana centers in states that legalized medicinal pot--no problem from a states' rights perspective for anyone. But if the generous interpreation of Steele's comments I just wrote is correct I really don't see what the fuss is about, and even if one believes he supports a return of the decision to the states I do not trust that people who have been equating abortion to the Holocaust for decades would be just fine with banning it in the Bible Belt and the Mormon Belt. So pro-lifers have little to worry about there.
It's just sad to see Mike Huckabee turn from being the last's campaign's reasonable conservative into the next campaign's most unhinged. My hopes of a Huck-led insurrection against the neocons and moneycons are evidently to go unfulfilled. Too bad. This is what the movement does to people, though: check out the number they did on Mitt Romney.
