The election is only two months away, the post-Labor Day campaign blitz in the race for governor is about to begin and, lo and behold, it’s the Republicans who are choking on the abortion issue.
Go figure.
When U.S. Rep. Bob Beauprez erroneously accused African-American women of terminating 70 percent of pregnancies – “maybe even more” – in a radio interview last week, he managed to take something that had dogged his Democratic opponent for months, something that should have been a nonissue for his socially conservative base, and turn it into a political misstep.
It was stunning.
His speedy apology signaled that his advisers knew there was no way he could spin his way around the offensive remark. They must have figured that his best hope after his performance on KCFR’s “Colorado Matters” was that people would come away thinking he was simply clueless, not racist and dishonest.
How could this happen to a smooth, experienced campaigner like Beauprez?
Easy.
With all the divisive issues being thrown across the election landscape this year, it’s hard to know which way to turn. And Democrats, who seemed powerless in the face of clever wedge-issue campaigns in the past, are learning how to neutralize them.
A case in point is the way the debate over stem-cell research has wreaked havoc within a community that had traditionally been identified as “pro-life.”
Suddenly, with the health of a diabetic child or an elderly relative with Alzhei mer’s hanging in the balance, “life” seems a lot more complicated than it once was.
Wedge-issue campaigns may be starting to lose their appeal.
Finally.
In 2000, at the height of Karl Rove’s influence, the common wisdom was that a few key issues, skillfully defined and shrouded in suggestion and innuendo, could be exploited to build a coalition of Southern whites and evangelicals that would join the base of pro-business, anti-tax stalwarts and elect Republicans.
The infamous “Southern strategy” to exploit white antagonism to the civil rights movement was nothing new. Richard Nixon is credited with perfecting it in 1968, and in a speech to the NAACP last year, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman acknowledged that the tactic was still prevalent.
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” he said.
Abortion was another linchpin in the wedge-politics juggernaut, but, as with race-baiting, it always has required a certain amount of finesse.
Polls consistently have shown that a large majority of Americans support abortion rights. So politicians who wanted to exploit the powerful emotions of abortion-rights opponents had to communicate solidarity with them without alienating everybody else.
This requires tremendous restraint – lots of platitudes and few specific proposals – and campaign managers had to be vigilant to keep candidates from overreaching.
That job is especially challenging in live interview situations.
The way they usually go, a candidate starts to relax after a while, moves away from the carefully scripted talking points and the next thing you know he gets all Mel Gibson, offering unvarnished opinions, manufacturing statistics and ad-libbing public policy without benefit of his PR defense team.
It happened to C. Ray Nagin a year ago when he delivered his New Orleans is a “chocolate city” remark.
It happened to Rep. Katherine Harris last month when she took her campaign for the U.S. Senate to a meeting of Baptists and said that the country had to elect “Christians, tried and true” because everybody else would “legislate sin.”
And it happened to Beauprez last week.
Political consultants call it “wandering off the reservation.”
The rest of us call it candor.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
