Obama and the Pro-Life Vote

Ross Douthat's been doing some writing on the shape of abortion politics under a Barack Obama administration. One particular project he's got going is a slap-down campaign against Douglas Kmiec, the pro-life Catholic law professor and Obama advisor who made a name for himself during the campaing by arguing that pro-lifers should back the Democratic nominee.

It's worth checking Douthat's links, but I like this part on why Kmiec should be given no slack:

Look, there are a variety of not-unreasonable ways for Americans who believe the unborn deserve legal protection to justify a vote for Barack Obama. But to claim that a candidate who seems primed to begin disbursing taxpayer dollars in support of abortion and embryo-destructive research as soon as he enters the White House somehow represented the better choice for anti-abortion Americans on anti-abortion grounds is an argument that deserves to met, not with engagement, but with contempt.

In another post Douthat links to Damon Linker, who makes an encouraging point in a piece at the New Republic:

Consider the voting patterns of the roughly 26 percent of Americans who describe themselves as white evangelical/born again Protestants. Early exit polls compiled by Steven Waldman at Beliefnet show that John McCain won these voters by a margin of 74 percent to 25 percent. That's down somewhat from Bush's record 78 percent in 2004, but still considerably higher than the number of evangelical votes Bush himself managed to win in 2000 (68 percent). That Obama, who aggressively courted these voters with religious appeals, fell five points short of Al Gore's 30 percent showing among evangelicals in 2000 must be judged a disappointment.

Here's the clincher:

As long as the Democratic Party continues to take its cues on social policy from those who refuse any compromise on abortion, it will give the Republicans the gift that keeps on giving: a large, stable, immensely loyal bloc of voters passionately committed to protecting (as they see it) innocent human life from lethal violence and those who champion the right to inflict it. For the moment, there aren't enough of these voters to get the GOP to victory. But there are more than enough of them to ensure that the Republicans will begin their efforts to reconstitute a winning coalition from a position of relative strength, with millions of motivated foot soldiers dedicated to the struggle ahead.

Suffice to say that for all of Obama's success in winning the lion's share of demographic constituencies, the numbers of the GOP share of the religiouis conservatives is a heartening sign for upcoming election cycles.