AwayPoint

As the Right Wing base sinks to new levels of insanity taking the Republican brand with it, “going stealth”  has become the campaign strategy of choice in districts where an all-out, Teabagger Town Hall, Palin-Beck, froth-mouthed feeding frenzy would just turn stomachs.  The Right’s agenda isn’t evolving, just its tactics.  You have to give it to those frackers.  They are smart. 

They still want to drown government in a bathtub.  Never mind that we need our safety net and education system more than ever.  They still think that some hubba hubba god made women “separate but equal"—men with brains and biceps, women with vaginas.   (It’s called complementarianism).  They still think we can teach creationism in schools and expect to be competitive internationally. (Bing “Academic Freedom Bills”). They still value life until birth. They still think we can end drug use by jailing addicts. They still think that guns don’t kill people.  They still think the problem with their marriage is my brother.  And they still think that you can give the free market absolute power without it corrupting absolutely.

But in some of the best run Republican and Religious Right (Rebiblican) campaigns in the country, you’d never know it.  Here in King County, Washington, the Right even funded a charter amendment making county races nonpartisan before running a “moderate, nonpartisan” Rebiblican named Susan Hutchison.  In Virginia and New Jersey, to quote Frank Rich,

"The very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine."

As several bloggers have warned (here, here, here), we should expect to see more of this over the next few years, especially since it worked beautifully for both McDonnell and Christie. The crowing about these two Rebiblican wins has spanned the country, in contrast to the dead silence about the Palin-Beck chow fest in upstate New York that the voters barfed up. 

What’s interesting is that the same stealth strategy failed miserably in Washington State.  Palin-wannabe Susan Hutchison was defeated by fourteen points after being ahead in the polls just weeks ago. 

What happened?  It’s very simple:  Word got out about who she is, and it made King County’s voters a bit queasy.  Reproductive rights activists took to the streets with homemade signs that made evening news. An anti-dominionist did research and then rallied colleagues at other blogs (e.g.God’s Own Party).  A public access TV host recruited guests to talk about Hutchison’s brand of politicized creationism.  A lefty blogger (Horsesass.org) defied copy-right claims to show footage Hutchison speaking to her base.  So did her opponent’s campaign.  So did local students.   A Seattle comic made his own funny low budget cartoon ad exposing Hutchison’s puppet masters.  

It is also true that the usual suspects—campaign professionals and volunteers, unions, advocacy groups and donors–played their roles and played them well.  And Susan Hutchison’s opponent Dow Constantine, now King County’s executive, is solid and experienced.  In the long run, that might have been enough.  But it wasn’t until Hutchison got exposed relentlessly and repeatedly from all sides that the tide of voter opinion turned.  By November 3, the voting public knew who Susan Palin Hutchison is, and for a stealth campaign, that’s lethal.  Several years ago, George Lakoff said that when the Right uses our language to cover their agenda they are showing us where they are weak, where the public actually disagrees with them.  When Rebiblicans pose as moderates and change agents, they have just exposed soft tissue. 

The right has the advantage in mainstream media, in hierarchy, authority, and message discipline.  But the left has the advantage when it comes to distributed information networks, outspoken renegades, and innovation.  If we want that East Coast crowing to stop, we need to start engaging these networks and cutting them loose (with funds as needed) to do what they do best.

The most controversial check I write each year is the one that goes to a small nonprofit called Project Prevention. Project Prevention pays drug addicts and chronic alcoholics to get permanent or long term birth control. Director Barbara Harris founded the program after adopting not one or two but four drug addicted babies from the same mother. She watched them scream and writhe inconsolably, backs arched and hands clenched, and she said, "Enough."

Reproductive rights organizations that I support like Planned Parenthood and NARAL don’t approve of Barbara’s work. It operates in a bioethical gray zone that makes them uncomfortable, and should. Here is their reasoning: Payment has the power to manipulate people into decisions they will regret. An addict may be desperate enough for a fix that she’d sell her soul, let alone her ability to reproduce.

I think they are right. Addiction does make people that desperate, and a decision born of desperation is a decision coerced. Consequently, addiction pits two things I cherish against each other. One of them is reproductive freedom. I believe passionately that parenthood is one of the richest, most spiritual dimensions of life, and that we collectively should neither obligate nor restrict it without overwhelming cause.

I also believe is that childhood is a precious trust, and we should bring children into this world only if we are prepared to honor that trust–to give them a decent shot at flourishing. Under the wrong circumstances childhood can be a living hell. And that is far more likely to be the case when children are the unintended product of unprotected sex, with the judgment of involved parties clouded by addiction.

When our ancestors had no control over fertility, childbearing wasn’t a moral decision. But now it is. I tell my children that we are responsible for what we have control over; power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Contraception is one of humanity’s newfound powers. So it is that contraceptives bring a new dimension of moral decision making to the human race. And as someone who has influence over another person’s reproductive decisions through my charitable giving, I end up having to weigh moral questions.

In my experience, we encounter moral dilemmas most often when two good things or two bad things are pitted against each other. It’s easy to say that childhood health is a good thing or to say that personal freedom is a good thing. But which matters more– the freedom of women to reproduce as they choose, or the right of children to have a healthy start in life?

As a woman, I am utterly grateful that my culture, U.S. Laws, scientific advances and financial privilege gave me a high level of reproductive freedom. I had the freedom to defer childbearing– to go to school, travel, and heal my childhood wounds first. I had the freedom to abort an unhealthy fetus. I had the freedom, finally, to bring two chosen daughters into a solid marriage with a bounty of love and life experiences to share. When I think of my own life, I value reproductive freedom a lot: for people I love like my daughters, but also for people I’ve never met.

But is it the needs of women or children that go most to the core for me? Mercifully, they often are aligned. Still, how do I weigh them when they come into conflict?

One way I get insight into my own hierarchy of values is by looking at what I do. Throughout my adult life, my most compelling efforts (grad school, work, volunteering, giving, writing) have been about making room for a little more delight and a little less pain in this world. To me, more reproductive freedom and fewer addicted babies both matter because they serve this end. But if I look closely at my own history, one of these values trumps the other. The lettering I painstakingly stuck on my car as a young therapist said, "Children deserve to be planned for and chosen." Years later, I was instantly smitten with a quirky warm political co-conspirator, Patricia, who declared that she was pro-choice because, "All babies deserve to have their toes kissed."

My checks to Project Prevention fit a pattern. They tell me that over all these years, my values–in this area, at least–haven’t changed. All babies do deserve to have their toes kissed, and their knees and elbows and unclenched hands. It is a bonus that, from the sound of things, most of Project Prevention’s efforts–inspired by Barbara’s babies–are giving women healthy (new) beginnings in life too.