Catherine Price is treating a position as novel that the Clintons were using 16 years ago.

One problem here is that, while the government can decide whether abortion is legal or illegal, it really does not have the power to decide whether it is rare or common. While saying "I dislike abortion, but I do not think it should be illegal" may sound nice, it doesn't actually produce any different result as "I think abortion should be the choice of the pregnant woman".

What I really dislike about this suppposed reasonableness is that it ignores the realities of what is going on. What's been going on for the past ten years has been a gradual encroaching of abortion rights. And still there are a lot of would-be Republican voters who do not believe that McCain would try to reverse Roe v. Wade any more than W. has. (The fact that W.'s appointees are now only one vote from doing exactly that, and Scalia in particular has been frustrated endlessly with the intransigence of Kennedy on this matter, is a fact that escapes the inattentive.)

Rather than worry about "evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics", it would be refreshing to see Democratic leaders to stick with the core vales of the party that actually command the respect of a solid majority of Americans, at least when anybody bothers to stand up for them.

Coming from a Catholic family, I can assure Ms. Price that a large number of Catholics are pro-choice. (How they stick with a religion that differs so dramatically with their own opinions is not something I understand, but so be it.) But it really is not a historical fluke that the large Catholic populations of the Northeastern cities have historically voted Democratic.

Catholics are not single-issue voters, and more than any other large group of people is. Catholics support compassion for the poor, while Republicans do not. Catholics support peaceful resolutions of conflict, while Bush and McCain do not. Catholics have traditionally been in immigrant populations, while the Republicans have traditionally represented the interests of the wealthy working class.

It remains unclear to me that a sizeable part of the population would be positively impressed by the effort to water down the Democratic position on this issue. OTOH, a sizeable part of the population will be negatively impressed by such a change.

This raises the issue: why is it that the advice the media gives to Republicans is always to represent their base, to ensure an energetic turnout, while the same media always advise Democrats to betray their base instead, looking for "swing voters". Has anybody ever written an article telling Republicans that they would have a better chance of getting swing voters if they would only abandon core ideas?

How do I get a job telling Salon readers to watch a video from the Onion as they satirize Cosmo?

Isn't this just a wee bit meta?