Won’t get fooled again?

Pro-life liberal Melinda Henneberger says social conservatives and pro-lifers have been played for suckers:

Among pro-lifers, I have long held the minority view that Bush never had the slightest intention of packing the Supreme Court with justices who would seek to overturn the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Karl Rove would throw himself in front of a train before he let that happen.

So where did I get my inside intel on this?

There have been several not-so-subtle signals from Bush himself. When asked, during his first campaign, whether he thought the decision should be overturned, he said the country was not ready.

At a news conference in Iowa in 2000, he was asked whether he would counsel a friend or relative who had been raped to have an abortion. He answered, “It would be up to her.”

That same year, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary at the time, said this to clarify his views on the issue: “There are several actions he thinks we can take and we should take and he will seek to take that can help make abortion more rare in America.” Oh.

Then there are the statements from the women in his life. The president’s mother and former First Lady, Barbara Bush, said this on banning abortion on ABC’s This Week in 1999: “I don’t think it should be a national platform. There’s nothing a president can do about it, anyway.”

First Lady Laura Bush went even further. When asked on NBC’s Today show in 2001 whether she thought Roe should be overturned, she said, “No, I don’t think it should be overturned.” Could she have been any clearer?

All the president’s talk about a “culture of life” might even have been sincere up to a point, of course; doesn’t everybody think they’re for a culture of life?

And it certainly did the trick for him. Many people I know—most of them pro-life Catholics who oppose the war and much of the rest of Bush’s domestic agenda—felt obligated to vote for the president on this one issue.

So will social conservatives now admit they’ve been had? Probably not.

I was surprised in 1999-2000 when social conservatives so readily jumped on the Bush bandwagon. I mean, this was the scion of the Bush family we were talking about – standard-bearers of country-club Republicanism. In retrospect, it looks more than a little like the syndrome that afflicted Democrats last year – to settle immediately on whoever seemed most “electable” and not worry too much about what his actual positions were.