Abortion Issue Could Distort Boxer-Herschensohn Race

In this most fractious of election years, there is at least one point on which consensus has been reached: The most interesting race not involving Ross Perot is the U.S. Senate contest between Rep. Barbara Boxer, an articulate and principled Democratic liberal, and television commentator Bruce Herschensohn, an articulate and principled Republican conservative.

As my friend the feminist peace activist cum born-again Boxer-booster said this week, “I haven’t been this excited about an election since Gene McCarthy.”

My friend the Catholic lawyer cum right-to-life organizer agreed. “For once,” he said, “it’s extremely satisfying to have a chance to cast my vote for a candidate who is articulately and without apologies pro-life.”

Their sentiments even were echoed by the Economist, the authoritative British news weekly: “The competition between Mr. Herschensohn and Ms. Boxer, pro-choice and as liberal a member of Congress as there is, will now be one of the joys of autumn,” a U.S. correspondent wrote in this week’s issue.

That, of course, is what it ought to be. Not since Alan Cranston ran against Max Rafferty have California voters been offered as clear and comprehensive a choice of ideologies and policies. However, the melancholy fact is that choice could be all but obscured if the U.S. Supreme Court does the expected thing and, sometime in the near future, votes to uphold a restrictive Pennsylvania abortion law in the case of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.

There is no better example of the distorting influence the never-ending abortion issue continues to exert on this nation’s politics than the likely impact of the court’s ruling on the Boxer-Herschensohn race. Here are two candidates who differ markedly and sincerely on the entire range of issues facing our national government. They also differ on the matter of choice: Boxer wants to maintain the right of women to terminate unwanted pregnancies; Herschensohn believes Roe vs. Wade ought to be overturned and that abortion should be permitted only in cases of rape and incest.

Their other substantive and consequential differences aside, the smart political money basically agrees that if the Court upholds the majority of the Pennsylvania statute’s provisions, as it seems likely to do, California’s senatorial contest will become a referendum on abortion alone.

As a political consultant to two national women’s organizations told me this week, “Pro-choice groups hope that the ruling in the Pennsylvania case will become this year’s Webster decision. In 1989, in the case of Webster vs. Reproductive Services, the Court restricted abortion rights and the result was evident. Doug Wilder, a black man, was elected governor of Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy. He won that office because the lily-white suburbs of northern Virginia went for him because he was pro-choice and his opponent was not. Pro-choice forces would like to see something similar happen this year, particularly in California, which is the most pro-choice state in the nation.

“They know the Court has the power to make abortion a very big issue in California, and they’re hoping that it will.”

This, of course, is where abortion’s perverse and distorting influence on our national politics becomes clear. As a practical matter, the Pennsylvania case is not likely to be decisive in this long debate. The most probable result is that the court will strike down the law’s spousal notification provisions and uphold most of the rest of its content. In doing so, the justices will be delivering a result in accord with the sentiment of a majority of Americans, who overwhelmingly support a woman’s right to abortion but oppose late-term abortions. They also favor a number of provisions embodied in the Pennsylvania law, such as parental notification and a waiting period.

But as the consultant to the women’s organizations said, “The perverse thing about abortion as a political issue is that such a ruling is unacceptable to both sides of this debate. If that is what the Court does, then the pro-choice organizations have to argue that they’ve suffered a defeat, that Roe has been overturned, even though it won’t have been. The pro-life people will have to deny that they’ve won a victory, even though they clearly will have. The reason is that the pro-choice forces, who know they enjoy majority support nationally and overwhelmingly in a place like California, need to energize their supporters with a threat to Roe. The pro-life people want to avoid it.

“To that end, both are willing to shade the truth, to exaggerate the threat to abortion rights in a place like California, which is likely to remain pro-choice no matter what the Court does about Roe.”

But the temptation to turn the Boxer-Herschensohn contest into a kind of referendum on abortion may be overwhelming for a couple of reasons:

All politicians want to be loved; really good ones know how important it is to be hated. They know it is their opponents’ hatred that, more often than not, moves their supporters to demonstrate their love in the form of money and votes. (Think about Richard Nixon for a second. Think about Dan Quayle’s recent series of speeches, including today’s to the National Right to Life Convention.) Both Boxer and Herschensohn could energize important parts of their constituencies by reducing their opponent’s views on abortion to the standard comic book caricatures that have come to dominate this never-ending political struggle.

Unfortunately, a substantial number of voters probably wouldn’t mind. Single-issue politics often are entertaining because they usually end up in a spitting match. Moreover, it’s easier to think about one thing at time.

The problem is that our national economic and political crisis does not have a single cause. And it cannot be reduced to one, even one as deeply felt as abortion continues to be.

What will be lost if the Boxer-Herschensohn race becomes a referendum on abortion alone is the chance for all of us to make a real political choice.