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While we're doing a campaign thread, I can't get through the ALCS without seeing ten of these fuckers, so y'all need to as well: How does everyone feel about this ad?
I generally think it is smart and well produced, except for the use of the term "Trimester" which is obfuscating for most people who don't think about abortion much, I think it would be more clear to say "after six months." I'm sure there's a focus grouped reason not to do that. Every time I talk to an abortion activist, pro or anti, they always talk in trimesters or weeks, instead of in months.
This represents a pretty major change from the messaging I, as an involved Republican, had been getting from the McCormick campaign for years now, which went something like "Pro-Life" or at the most liberal "Leave it to the States (Does Not Support a Federal/National Ban)."
This is McCormick directly advocating for a policy of elective abortion through six months of pregnancy, with exceptions for Rape etc. Though he does not indicate an intention to introduce national legislation on the matter, that is implied by the context of the ad when he's running for Senate, though limited by supporting "Pennsylvania's" laws on the matter. I suppose you could maybe weasel what he says here into supporting abortions for reasons of rape, incest*, life of the mother through six months; but it seems like the obvious meaning of his phrasing is that he's in favor of elective abortion through six months and exceptions later. This would, in my mind, be very hard to flip-flop on later; though of course we've seen worse.
My first thought is that this is the polity healing itself. Now that the legislated-from-the-bench forced compromise of Roe v Wade is behind us, Americans and their politicians are getting down to horse trading and finding a reasonable political compromise on the issue.
But of course this is dependent on McCormick winning using this strategy. If he gets back more votes from squishy pro-abortion voters than he loses from strident pro-lifers, then the compromise has been accepted and succeeded. But if he loses because pro-life voters are now watching him on TV every day say that he supports six months of abortion-by-choice, well then we might see a hardening of positions after this election.
Of course, my biggest frustration with McCormick remains that he refuses to talk about his best achievements. Every ad, every day, talking about how he grew up in Bloomsberg, went to West Point, wrestled. That's it. Nothing about his PhD from Princeton. Nothing about running one of the world's largest hedge funds. I only know these things about him from outside newspaper articles and wikipedia. According to McCormick's own campaign, he sorta went into stasis after the Army. By outside qualifications he is probably the smartest politician I've had the chance to vote for since Romney, and he refuses to bring any of it up. Sad commentary on modern politics.
*I've never understood why incest gets its own heading on the list. All the examples pro-abortion folk use to talk about incest are just rape-by-family-member which would obviously fall under the rape heading; and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.
It's both amusing and slightly scary that even Republicans are now proposing abortion laws that would be considered (far-)leftwing in most of Europe.
I am pro-life, but I think its a good thing. It means Republicans are looking at what is feasible to do and trying to do that. Few things are as irritating as my side making the perfect the enemy of the good. Compromising too much is abandonment of principle, but standing on principle so firmly that you cede winnable ground to the enemy sort of is too. And now that abortion is not a constitutional matter it is always open to further changes so I'd rather take what I can get now and then keep working towards more later.
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It's not common, but it's also not terribly smart for a civilization to knowingly and intentionally bring into the world babies with such severe deficiencies. I understand horrible things happen by accident all the time and we should have grace and charity to those cases, but incest is taboo for a good reason ...
Surely you could say the same about any pregnancy where one or both parents have a serious hereditary condition?
If both parents have the same recessive condition, yeah. It's a big thing that genetic counselors will counsel for.
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Incest does not typically result in "severe deficiencies" in one generation.
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Sound decisions, both. It's almost certainly bad for his campaign if voters think he's one of "the elites", and hedge funds have a morally questionable reputation amongst the commonfolk (see also: Romney, Mitt).
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I would imagine that most people don't actually know how long a trimester is. I don't actually know myself, but from context I assume it is three months?
Abortions after six months sounds extremely late to me, given that a pregnancy is nine months long (usually). I would suppose that using "six months" also sounds very late to most people who aren't familiar with pregnancy. Meanwhile, a trimester could be anything to the common person. Three days? Three weeks?
So using "trimester" probably keeps timelines ambiguous, and "weeks" sounds a lot shorter than months (how many weeks are in a pregnancy? I think most people couldn't answer that without calculation).
An effective ad would be to simply show pictures of pregnant women at say 3m, 5m, 7m, 9m. That is a simple, visceral set of images that most people will be immediately familiar with and can instinctively compare.
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I've heard that the trimester language started being used because of the abortion debate and trying to make convenient bright lines, but I don't know how true that is. Pregnancy isn't really 9 months but rounding generously gives you the three-part structure.
Anyone that's been pregnant or close to someone pregnant should know it's (roughly) 40 weeks; appointments tend to be scheduled by weeks rather than months. Outside of the pregnant and adjacent, I'd be surprised if many people get the "right" answer even if they calculate.
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Vance is probably in the category. Yale JD. VC.
Hill dawg by qualifications as well.
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