FightFOCA: What Would Karl Rove Do?

by Jack Yoest · January 7, 2009

Just before the election, Charmaine and Your Business Blogger(R) attended an intimate off-the-record lunch with Karl Rove.

Karl Rove, Charmaine and Your Business Blogger(R)

Rove talked about election strategy and the Obama wish list.

Obama promised Planned Parenthood that the ‘Freedom of Choice Act’ or FOCA would be the first item of legislation he would sign.

Karl Rove has some experience against the Planned Parenthood machine — the billion dollar enterprise that will push for FOCA; for the removal of any regulation of abortion on demand: Partial birth, parental notification, clinical standards, physician standards. It is possible to win against Planned Parenthood.

Rove has beaten a Richards before.

Rove was the, well, architect of the Bush victory over Ann Richards for Texas governor. The late Ann Richards is the mother of Cecile Richards, the present president of Planned Parenthood. Richards the younger has been trained in the workings political machinery.

To beat the current wily Richards (let’s not call her “Tricky Dick”), Rove might suggest tactics he’s done before to win. This time to FightFOCA; simple as 1-2-3,

1. Unify

2. Target

3. Turnout

1. Knowledge is good; and a winner. Conservative Pro-Lifers will be able to unify and bring together even Pro-Choicers who are concerned about knowing if their daughters are going to have an abortion. Pro-Abortionists would approve of the abortion. But all parents want to know if their children are playing with edged weapons and more so if they go under the knife. FightFOCA brings together Pro-Choice and Pro-Life voters. Obama would indeed be a ‘uniter.’

2. Rove would suggest targeting this constituency who would have a passionate position on knowing if their children are going to have surgery by strangers. And who would be paying for the abortion. No parent would allow a stranger to give candy to their children; parents would not allow a stranger to operate on their child. Rove would identify this group, persuade them and then prompt them to action. The best sales process involves acknowledging pain — avoiding the pain and providing a solution to solve the problem. The fear that mom and dad will lose control over the health decisions of their child is worrisome enough without Uncle Sam stepping in.

3. During an election the Rove strategy was to get a segment to the polls — he knew he didn’t need all the voters, only 50 percent + one to win a state. The action to FightFOCA is to bring the voters to movement — so that Obama would have to delay the FOCA coming from Reid and Pelosi. This will be a challenge: Cecile Richards served as Pelosi’s deputy chief-of-staff a few years ago. The tactic would be to make FOCA a costly, bloody fight of Obama against parents. Win or lose, Obama would be severely weakened in approval polls. And ‘Pro-Life’ Senator Reid, a Mormon, is not doing so well in his re-election polling from his home state of Nevada. His approval is 38 percent; negatives at 54.

Alert Readers know that it is nearly impossible for a candidate to win an election with negatives above 40 percent. Reid is in trouble.

Reducing abortion now polls very well for Lifers. Parental involvement polls at 70 percent approval. No liberal, finger-in-the-wind president fights this trend in the polling numbers.

At least not in his first term. Obama will delay if there is any chance that key voting groups of groups would vote against him in 2012 — from Pro-Choice parents to Pro-Life activists; from liberal Catholics to conservative Evangelicals.

Not all agree. Alert Reader SoMG sends this counter-analysis on FOCA

Obama has everything to gain by passing FOCA. It will establish him as someone who means what he says. His friends will rejoice in his smile and his enemies will tremble at his frown.

It is not certain that Obama wishes to create any enemies — at least not until after the ’12 election. Conservatives have a number of concerns — but we are not ‘trembling.’

The payoff will swamp the investment in political capital. Any honest right-winger from Machiavelli to Pat Buchanan to Carl Rove would say the same. What does he have to lose? Right-to-Lifers in general and the Catholic Church Hierarchy in particular declared war against him more than a year ago and their prosecution of their war has been limited only by fear of losing tax-exempt status and after the election by not knowing how vengeful he might turn out to be. He has nothing to lose.

If Obama cannot keep the Catholic vote, he will lose in 2012. The conservative Pro-life Catholic constituency running the Catholic hospital system will shut down rather than perform or refer for abortions.

As much as Obama wants chaos so that he can attempt to consolidate power in a single payer national health care system, he cannot lose the health care capacity in the near term of the closing of the Catholic hospitals. One hospital in 8 is controlled by the Catholic Church. And close they will if FOCA passes.

SoMG continues,

I count a filibuster-proof pro-FOCA majority in the Senate. Fifty-seven Dems, plus two Independents, minus RTL Dem Casey, plus three pro-choice Republicans makes sixty-one and that’s assuming the scheisskopf beats the clown in Minnesota which doesn’t look so likely given that if the recount’s too close the US Senate decides…

My prediction about FOCA: with great pomp and circumstance (to coin a phrase) the Congress will amend FOCA to specify that it doesn’t mean Catholic hospitals have to refer for abortions in order to get paid by the government.

That’s the most likely interpretation anyway–the Act forbids governments, not the providers paid by the governments, from discriminating against (or for) abortion.

If your client gets an equal choice between a Catholic hospital that doesn’t do abortions, and an abortion clinic that doesn’t do live births, you’re not discriminating, right? But they’ll write it in explicitly.

Then the GOP will take credit for saving the Catholics from abortion, the Dems will take credit for being reasonable in victory (much more so than the Republicans were), women in the armed forces will be able to get abortions without going off site which it’s very stupid for them to have to do.

Everybody will win. Right-to-lifers will rejoice in new Federal protection for the right to refuse abortion and grow your pregnancy, which will be increasingly important as we continue our ongoing transfer to government health care and government acquires a greater interest in aborting problem pregnancies.

Conservatives and the Catholic Church have picked FOCA as the hill to live or die on — if FOCA passes with religious exceptions, conservatives know that this would be a liberal incremental step to first minimize, then marginalize and finally eliminate the church in the public square.