Pundit Fever

The Carpetbagger catches EJ Dionne in a bout of pundit fever, that peculiar malady that forces otherwise intelligent columnists to pretend that whatever solution or ill they've discovered is a threat to the political party they're criticizing, even while said party is way ahead of them on the issue. Today EJ dashes off to meet a county official from Long Island who has found a novel new approach on choice: he agrees that it's bad, wants it to remain legal, and is focusing on reducing the total number of abortions. This formulation, otherwise known as the Hillary Clinton approach or Reid's Prevention First bill offers precisely nothing new to the Democratic party that's currently pushing it, but you'd think the EJ had found a political rosetta stone that Terry McAulliffe and Ed Gillespie had kept hidden through sheer force of will.

The worst part of this column is that Dionne doubtlessly knows where the blame belongs: squarely on the chest of a Christian Right that has no interest in anything but the full criminalization of abortion. That's why Hillary Clinton's call for compromise was met with this bored, hostile rejection:

Carol Tobias, political director for the National Right to Life Foundation, dismissed the invitation as an effort "to get the pro-life movement into a debate over birth control," on which her organization takes no position. Ms. Tobias called the Democrats' talk "pulling the wool over the eyes of voters."

Dionne's role, now, isn't to point out a two-party equivalence that doesn't exist, but to separate those looking for constructive solutions from those sustaining a wedge issue. Right now, the vast majority of the Democratic party is firmly among the first group and they're being stymied by powerful elements within the Republican party who refuse to consider a middle ground. Dionne's guns should be focused on them.