Entries in MassPoliticsProfs by Jerold Duquette
The news that the number of abortions being performed has declined has ignited a debate about who deserves the political credit. Are abortions declining because of legal restrictions on the practice enacted in red states across the country, or are they down due to increasing use of contraceptives and sex education? Is this good political news for the pro-choicers or the pro-lifers? Enter Jeff Jacoby who, in his latest Boston Globe column, argues that young Americans are less inclined to get abortions thanks to the efforts of those who have pushed gruesome images of aborted fetuses and distorted the issue by pretending that all abortions, at any stage of pregnancy or for any reason, are morally and legally equivalent. The pretense of moral equivalence is juvenile. The pretense of legal equivalency is flat stupid.
The 2016 race for the White House is starting to feel strangely familiar. It’s starting to feel a lot like the Massachusetts 2012 U.S. Senate race between Senator Scott Brown and Professor Elizabeth Warren. That race provided much of the impetus for the creation of MassPoliticsProfs, by the way. We launched the blog on August 15, 2011 and my very first post was an explanation of why Elizabeth Warren would be an excellent challenger to Senator Brown. On January 13, 2012, months before she had even earned the Democratic nomination, I flatly stated what I saw as the obvious…that Warren would in fact win both the nomination and the election. While a presidential election surely has more moving parts than a U.S. Senate race, and despite the fact that the election is still nearly 17 months away, I am awfully tempted to try to bolster my claims to “soothsayer” status by going national, dropping the CYA qualifications, and calling the 2016 presidential election for Hillary Clinton now.
What the Republicans desperately need to avoid, if they hope to win the White House in 2016, is a friendly nomination fight in which the viable candidates (like Jeb Bush) go easy on the non-viable candidates (like Cruz, Paul, & Carson) directing their attacks instead exclusively at the outgoing president and the presumptive Democratic nominee, while relying on dog whistles to satisfy and pacify the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing faction of the party’s primary electorate.
In discussing the presidential ambitions of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas with my mother recently I realized that the method to his madness was not actually foreign to me. My mother reminded me that he was employing a tactic that I perfected in my teenage years when I frequently frustrated the efforts of my parents to hold me accountable for various transgressions or my siblings' efforts to retrieve stolen goods from me. Senator Cruz, my mother assures me, simply [mis]appropriates the case against him, reversing the accuser and the accused in his telling. So simple, yet so confounding.
We here at MassPoliticsProfs are in the process of reassessing the way the Massachusetts Democratic and Republican Parties go about nominating statewide candidates. Professor Ubertaccio describes the project in this recent Patriot Ledger op-ed. The first of several panel discussions in our “Party Matters” series was held on March 5th in Boston and a second will be convening at UMass, Amherst this spring. Have the Bay State’s party organizations denied ordinary voters (enrolled and unenrolled) their rightful place in statewide elections? Do party nomination rules help or hurt party nominees in the general election?
The Knights of Columbus’ decision not to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade this year is shameful. The organization’s excuse for pulling out is transparently dishonest.The Knight’s leaders don’t want to march in a parade with gay people, so they accuse these gay people of political divisiveness for wanting to march in a parade, for wanting to be a part of a community. On the bright side, I can now feel a little bit less guilty about having not participated in the K of C in years (I’m a 3rd degree Knight).