Well kids, we're fucked; run the Obama-Hates-Babies ad...

I realize this is going to provide aid and comfort to the know-nothing Bob-Barr fringe -- essentially, women in parka vests with coolers of rain water and grain alcohol in their camper-back pickups, busily protecting our precious bodily fluids --but this ad started running in Ohio yesterday, 10/7, night after the debate, during the news hour:

BHO is up 14 in Pennsylvania, up 10 in Wisconsin, up 14 in Minnesota, up 6 in Colorado, up 7 in Nevada and ahead by a couple in Ohio, Florida and Virginia. Obama has a plus 19 favorable. In order to win the election, McCain has to sweep 8 toss-up states (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida). To repeat: Barry only has to win a state larger than Colorado. Stakes is high.

What's interesting to me is to see what McCain does when cornered, and to figure what that means for his party: it's clear that, in a tough spot, he's decided to swing to the right. Bad debate fixed with abortion ads. Bad VP debate fixed by domestic terrorist smears. Bad economy fixed by accusing FNMA and FMAC of loaning too much money to poor, inner-city black folk. The preconditions-meme, the government-chooses-your-doctor-meme, usw; all the familiar tropes of 1990s AM radio on an eternal-return.

Now, what that means is that McCain has adopted a revolutionary posture. Like the SI said, revolutionary language (or punk rock, for Greil Marcus) brings the unsettled debts of history back into play. 1990s revanchists evidently believe that their concerns remain incompletely addressed. And there's a case for that. But there's no real way to pay them their ransom; when public discourse is held hostage, the price of release escalates every time it is met, (e.g., the NRA radicalized gun ownership in the late 1970s via the specter of government raids on private homes; then by fighting mandatory gun-locks, mandatory gun registration, background checks on purchasers, handgun bans in inner cities. Their demands are now so acute that even Pennsylvania's proposed one-gun-a-month law was treated as a mortal danger and scuttled.) thereby making the tactic profitable so long as the stakes are low, and incremental gains tiny.

If your movement calls for France to reclaim the Ruhr valley, your movement will fail; if your movement calls for the full funding of French-language private schools in Alsace, then you can work your way east. Likewise, no one wants to overturn Roe v. Wade; they want to stop clinics that promote abortion-on-demand, stop spending tax dollars on contraceptives overseas, and protect the babies that survive partial birth abortion.

THUS, the ad above. Barry clearly voted against the Illinois law because he refused to be baited by the fringe right. Let's recall that less than one percent of all abortions in the US occur after 24 weeks; extraction-and-dilation accounts for a fraction of that; what Illinois zealots believe to be botched E&D would account for a fraction of that number. If that number exists at all. The whole intent of the law was to scare providers into no longer providing. If doctors think they'll lose their license for a one in a million mistake made in a one in 10,000 procedure, they'll do the math; if insurers see a risk, no matter how infinitesimal, they will kill said risk.

The capstone in the right's strategy is to gradually push all women wanting abortions into late-term, high-risk procedures: 87 percent of all American counties have no abortion provider; 60 percent of all women delay abortions. If there's no Plan B, if there's abstinence-only education, if there's intense public disapprobation of abortion, women get funnelled into the high-risk procedures. Then, all the right has to do to de facto outlaw abortion is to outlaw the high-risk procedures. Viz. the Guttmacher Institute.

I mean, that's the theory. Again, the whole point of fighting on the fringe is to keep the issue alive. The point is to fight, not to win. The vast majority of women who have abortions do so for economic reasons. To tangle with the main causes of abortion would be to tangle with poverty. This ad is to bring out the base (in both senses of the word). Running this ad, at this time exemplifies the McCain-Palin retreat-to-the-right, and their preparation for the advent of the Hensarling Quasar...
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