Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

Well this is some ridiculous news for a Monday morning. NARAL, the big pro-choice group, went and endorsed Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island's Senate race. I speculate they started the process when it looked like pro-lifer and otherwise awesome congressman Jim Langevin was going to run, but he declined. The Democratic candidates are Secretary of State Matt Brown, who I support, and former state Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse, another good guy. So which of the two is the pro-life candidate that drove NARAL into Chafee's arms? According to the Projo:

Chafee, Brown and Whitehouse all classify themselves as strongly "pro-choice," meaning they support the right of women to choose abortions.

Unfortunately, this is a big deal for the campaign. No one sits at home waiting for marching orders from NARAL, but you can be sure this is going to pop up in Chafee's TV ads next year when he wants to prove his moderate credentials.

I really don't know why NARAL's doing this. There's one idea, that they may just be spiteful about the Democrats making Harry Reid the Senate leader, running Bob Casey against Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, and flirting with Jim Langevin in RI. All three are pro-life, and they can't exactly endorse Rick Santorum, so they're going with Chafee instead of the two pro-choice candidates in Rhode Island. They also claim Brown and Whitehouse don't have voting records, so they've yet to display their true pro-choice credentials, but if you ask me that's a red herring. Brown has actually gone ahead and said he'd apply a litmus test to judges: if you're pro-life, he'll vote you down. Does that pledge not count? If he broke it, he couldn't get away with it.

Here's one more reason, also from the Projo:

A further wrinkle on the other side of the abortion issue: NARAL President Nancy Keenan said she hoped the group's early endorsement -- to be formalized when Chafee addresses the organization today -- will help the senator sink a potential primary fight from Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey.

This has been the interesting subplot of the RI Senate race for some time: what could popular and conservative Stephen Laffey beat Chafee in a Republican primary? The answer, in my opinion, is yes, but it misses the larger point, that there's no chance in hell Stephen Laffey could win the general election. I mean come on guys. NARAL says, "We need Lincoln Chafee's sensible, moderate, Republican voice" in the Senate. Actually, we don't. We need another Democrat.

Fortunately, this has sparked a movement at the fabulously influential DailyKos blog, namely, that Democrats have got to stop being held hostage by interest-group politics. The whole post is gold, but my favorite part is the close:

The era of the single issue group is in its closing days. Note the new generation of activist organizations -- MoveOn, Democracy for America, the blogs -- all confederations of activists, banding together for the common progressive cause.

That's the future of our party. I'd love to see the single issue groups become quasi-think tanks, pumping out research and information the rest of us could use to generate activism. Unlike NARAL or Sierra Club, these confederations can walk and chew gum at the same time. We could work to defend a women's right to choose on Monday and fight to proctect ANWR on Tuesday.

To those who fight to defend the status quo, in which the single issue groups dominate the Democratic Party, just one more argument -- they've lost. We haven't won a majority of the popular vote in a presidential election since 1976. We've lost our congressional majorities. We've lost the courts. A unified conservative movement has systematically attacked and destroyed our divided side -- from labor, to the environmental movement, to the choice groups. Those groups have failed.

Their singular focus on themselves, at the exclusion of all else, has cost our movement dearly. And if there's one thing none of us should tolerate, it's failure.

So defend your favorite issue, but don't defend the system. A system of special interest checkboxes won't win elections. A principled core philosophy will.

Couldn't say it better.