More on Miers

I don't want to belabor the issue, but I do think the Miers nomination is an important conversation given the centrality of the abortion question to the moral anthropology's engagement with the political culture.  Rick's thoughtful and appreciated response prompts a few additional thoughts and clarifications:

First, my cynicism toward the GOP's use of abortion is not meant to suggest that there was no meaningful difference represented in the choice between Kerry and Bush on "culture of life" issues.  I'm a registered Democract, but could not pull the lever for Kerry given his longstanding lack of appreciation for the moral dimension of the abortion question.  (Nor could I pull the lever for Bush, truth be told.)

Second, the list of pro-life actions taken by President Bush, while not to be minimized, share a common thread of not requiring much expenditure of political capital.  If abortion is akin to slavery in being our generation's great moral struggle (a view held by a big chunk of Bush's religious base), doesn't the struggle require more?  Can anyone imagine Lincoln saying that the subject of slavery never came up in any conversation with his closest legal aide? 

Third, while Bush has been very careful not to call for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, he has consistently implored our nation to "set a great goal that unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law."  If unborn children are going to be protected in law, from my understanding that will either require a constitutional amendment or the reversal of Roe v. Wade.  President Bush, while not shy about pushing amendments on other divisive culture war issues that are doomed to fail, hasn't talked (to my knowledge) at all about an abortion amendment.

Finally -- and here is the crux of the matter, in my view -- I'm not sure that the political calculation undertaken by many Catholic and evangelical voters accurately reflects reality.  Many of the Catholics and evangelicals I know who voted for Bush went through some sort of cost-benefit analysis: the cost of supporting Bush's policies on taxes (or the environment, war, etc.) were deemed to be outweighed by the benefit of supporting his policy on abortion.  Sometimes the benefit side was supplemented with gay marriage, religious expression in public, or school choice, but abortion was always the dominant factor on the benefit side.  And at least for my acquaintances, when they voted based on Bush's abortion stance, they weren't pinning their hopes on reinstatment of the Mexico City policy.

Rob

UPDATE: My colleague Elizabeth Brown informs me that:

Bush has spoken about a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, but he has not done so consistently. When he was first running for Congress in 1978, he didn’t support such an amendment on the grounds that the decision on whether to have an abortion should be left up to a woman and her doctor, although he was personally opposed to abortion. When he ran against Ann Richards in 1994 for Governor of Texas, he refused to discuss abortion and his campaign literature stated, “The United States has settled the abortion issue.”  When running for President in 2000, he stated in his debates with John McCain that he supported the GOP platform, which advocated a constitutional amendment against abortion, although he would prefer that exceptions be made in case of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.   The GOP plank does not include those exceptions.  He also indicated to the Economist that he would not work to get such an amendment passed.  Given this history, it is not surprising that he is not interested in spending political capital on the abortion issue now, particularly when his political capital is at an all time low for his presidency.  The majority of his actions on abortion either had bipartisan support or could be done unilaterally by him with little fanfare.  For example, I doubt most Americans know what the Mexico City policy is.