Dig That Hole Deeper

Via Jeff, it seems that Senator Obama doesn't want us to interpret his recent comments about abortion and "mental distress" according to accepted definitions of English words. What he meant when he said

Now, I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term

is that mental disorders are perfectly acceptable conditions to consider when discussing the health of the mother, and that even though Obama specifically singled out the term "physical issue" when discussing valid concerns for health-related exceptions, he meant the opposite, which is that physical issues are not the only valid concerns.

Further, even though the anti-abortion crowd regularly accuses women of seeking late term abortions frivolously and claims that doctors (all two of them in the whole country) who perform them are willing to justify them for any reason no matter how petty and shallow, no one actually interprets the law this way - not legislators, not courts, not doctors and not women.  However, even though this is an imaginary problem, completely unsupported by any evidence at all and was cooked up by crazed right-wingers looking to smear some of our society's most vulnerable citizens as selfish whores, Obama thinks it's important to "emphasize" the issue.

I'm glad that's clear!  What's rather less clear is why spokesperson Linda Douglass would choose to say the following:

the senator from Illinois was making a distinction in the magazine interview between medically diagnosed mental illness and the kind of mental distress that an unwanted pregnancy causes many a pregnant mother.

"Mental distress is not an illness." Douglass said. "He absolutely believes and has always said there has to be a health exception for serious physical and mental illness."

I'm sure Douglass didn't really mean to imply a difference between "real" mental illness and the yucky feelings those hormonal pregnant women get, like post-partum depression.  She was given the job of parsing out a fairly clear statement so that it could appear to mean something other than what it obviously did. 

But this is where transparent pandering gets you.  This is what happens when you decide to abruptly and drastically change your campaign's rhetoric and positioning in order to score some points with the other side.  For such a smart campaigner with such a tight operation, it's very sloppy.  And the way in which Obama reversed himself so quickly and clearly means that not one abortion-issue voter is going to change his or her mind as a result of this pander. 

The myth of the selfish whores getting evil doctors to abort their 38-week pregnancies is the foundation of every single piece of legislation that seeks to restrict access to abortions.  In America's churches, abortion is a convenience of the modern age, something for the whores to fall back on if they forget a pill or a condom, and which allows the Bible-defying career woman to continue dominating men in the workplace.

And in order to pander to the group of people least likely to support his candidacy - other than the KKK, but there's overlap between them - Obama casually decided to perpetuate that destructive myth.  Obama advanced the anti-choice crowd's most effective rhetorical gambit in order to make a cheap political ploy of his own.  Nothing, not the desire for a landslide, not the unfounded belief that a few words in Relevant magazine will sway a couple million Evangelicals to change decades of political allegience, nothing is worth dismissing the rights and concerns of millions of women.

Disgusting.

Comments

[fumphis]

Stephen, I think you're being willfully obtuse, or else you just have it in for Obama. There is nothing panderific about drawing a distinction between mental distress and a mental disorder. It seems clear from these two statements that under the "mental distress" category fall things like regret over conceiving the child, worries about the child's quality of life, and fears about the financial stresses brought on by rearing an infant. A "mental disorder," however, would be a diagnosed, medically relevant psychic condition, such as clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and the like (postpartum depression doesn't really work, because by definition it occurs after birth).

I don't understand why you're knocking Obama's campaign for drawing a distinction between being "distressed" over pregnancy and being mentally ill. This is an earthquake in an eggcup and it's counterproductive.

[Josh R.]

to the group of people least likely to support his candidacy

Why do you think he's trying to win votes...as opposed to trying to soft pedal support for McCain? Keeping N voters from voting McCain by showing you're not a crazy liberal is the same as getting N voters for yourself, after all.

[Lisa Simeone]

Oooh -- "panderific." I love it! That's one neologism I'm going to start using. I'm only sorry I didn't think of it myself. I will credit you, fumphis, for this delightful zinger.

[Amanda Marcotte]

Fumphis, one simple reason: He reinforced the belief in a myth. When you condemn something, you imply that it's real. There is no such thing, in this country, of a legal 3rd trimester abortion for "distress" or "regret". You have to have a medical indicator. Anti-choicers would have you believe that a 10-year-old whose dad is raping her and who hid her pregnancy out of trauma until she's showing doesn't "deserve" the abortion and is trying to escape with the mental health clause. Obama doesn't need to feed that bullshit.

He simply should have said that he agrees with current restrictions, which allow for the health and life of the mother.

[Corvus9]

Eh, I don't think it really matters if he reinforced a myth in this case. He made a distinction that isn't there, while in the belly of the beast. (Relevant is an evangelical publication, right?) There is nothing wrong with using the framing devise of the other side when talking to them, since that's the way they think, you might as well. He could launch into a long spiel about how, like, their entire worldview is false, man, and they need to see with new eyes, or something, but I think any long explanation would lose any trust he had built up, and that's counter-productive. You have to warm them up before you can pull them over to the dark side, and voicing an opposition to something that doesn't actually happen anyways seems like a pretty sensible approach to me. You don't actually give anything up, and you appear more "to the right."

I know it seems like Obama is acting like a fuckhead a lot recently, but one thing I have learned during this campaign is that Obama and his team are actually better at this than all the bloggers telling him what he should to. The man is just awesome at politics. Maybe I don't like all the things he is doing (especially FISA) but I think at some point you just have to, as Spider Jerusalem said, "trust the fuckhead."