BIG SISTER AND LITTLE SISTER IN CROSSTOWN SCRAMBLE ON ELECTION NIGHT

If anyone had a doubt who Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell and his acolyte City Commissioner Rosalynn Bliss were backing in the Second Ward race, they let the cat out of the bag on election night last Tuesday.  Big Sister and Little Sister were partying with fellow PWAista Ruth Kelly at her campaign gala at Toxic Towers when the bad news began trickling in.  Kelly's opponent, David LaGrand, was drubbing her at the polls.  In fact, LaGrand ended up winning 60% of the vote.  By the middle of the evening, the Sisters got a clue and hustled over to LaGrand's house to congratulate him on his victory.

Perhaps Heartwell and Bliss don't get it and so found themselves in the wrong place on election night, but I think abortion politics (or more comprehensively, the culture of death issues) are playing a bigger role in municipal elections.  Maybe not directly in that a pro-choice candidate for city office can no longer expect any support from pro-life voters.  Rather, voters are losing their patience with the deceptions of closet pro-choicers, especially after the publicity surrounding Heartwell's ill-received direct mailing to Catholic voters during the mayoral race.

It may well be that Kelly's coyness about her stand on abortion, hinting that she may have picked up the Right to Life endorsement if she has chosen to pursue it after having gotten the nod from the pro-abortion Progressive Women's Alliance, was too much for many Second Ward voters to swallow.  She probably would have done better with an honest declaration of her positions on abortion and other life issues.  That lack of candor, whatever one thinks of the relevance of abortion in a city commission race, certainly cost Kelly votes in a low turn-out election.  If so, this was a watershed year in city politics.

Comments

[Dan]

I wouldn't say his win was because of the RTL endorsment. David is a very good campaigner and will make a great commish member. As a voter, when you look at the differant groups that supported him it was all over the board, most all labor unions including the police and fire, RTL, the chamber of commerce. Then you look at what he does, has invested his own money to help in the very same community he lives in by being part owners in four friends coffee and wealthy street bakery and on top of that is an attorney. All these diverse groups normally pick differant sides but on this one the choice was clear. I also believe Ruth ran a good campaign and is also a very capable person for the job, David simply is more rounded and understands the issue from all sides.

[The Executive Director]

Hi, Dan.

I don't think the RTL and PWA endorsements determined the outcome either. I think the candidates' forthrightness and lack of it on the life issues played a significant role. My sense is that voters are generally less patient with artful responses from candidates that obfuscate rather than clarify their views (on any important matter, not just abortion).

Regards, Bill

[Rollnggrnade]

The idea that abortion politics had anything to do with the Kelly-LaGrand race is even sillier than the idea that it had anything to do with Heartwell's election.

[D. A. Cappazzie]

I for one voted for the one who stood up the most for life, not the one backed by pro-choice womens groups. So, call me silly as much as you like. At least I voted. At least I looked at the issues. These two were alike in many ways. One way they were not stood out. Thus, my vote went for LaGrand and a vote for life.

Donna

[The Executive Director]

Grenade,

You apparently don't get it. Where a candidate stands on fundamental issues like abortion communicates important information to the voter about a candidate's values. So the RTL and PWA endorsements do matter in municipal elections even if city officials have limited authority to effect policy on the life issues.

Of course, pols like Heartwell and Kelly do get what you don't. They know that voters in G.R. are generally pro-life, which is why they go to some trouble to keep under wraps their views which are hostile to the pro-life agenda. That is also why pols who are pro-life don't keep it a secret, because RTL will endorse multiple candidates in a race. They can get the seal of approval that voters are looking for.

It matters.

Regards, Bill

[Rollnggrnade]

Donna,

I wasn't saying that your single-issue voting was silly - I was saying that chalking up the results of the race to a single issue like abortion is lacking in evidence.

There were plenty of substantive differences between Kelly and LaGrand without factoring in abortion. Though they talked alike (unfortunately all politicians do - which makes it understandably different to sort through the clutter) but if you look at who is donating to their campaigns and who is endorsing them - you can tell a great deal about where they stand on the issues. LaGrand is pro-business and development, and Kelly is focused issues like education and social services.

[Rollnggrnade]

Bill,

Where a candidate stands on abortion CAN communicate important information about a candidate's values. Unfortunately, though, that's no longer true. Politicians have long been wise to the power of stances and focus on 'red meat' issues like abortion (or same-sex marriage) as a great way to direct people away from the the other 99.9% of their stands on issues which would be woefully unpopular. In fact most of them aren't even necessarily committed to their anti-abortion stance; just take Bill Frist - he's long campaigned on an anti-abortion platform, and yet his family owns one of the largest abortion providers in the US.

We're seeing that now with the Bush Administration. They knew what buttons to push on 'red meat' issues to get elected, and once they got there - they completely abandoned the base of people that voted them in (which has now had the result of disenfranchising the entire conservative movement). Does anyone think Rudy Giuliani now pandering to the right-to-life crowd is indicative of his actual position on abortion?

I would disagree that voters in GR are generally pro-life; at least not in the city. In the outlying areas that's most likely true - but not the whole of Kent County (especially given that, like most areas, the density of the population in the city often outweighs the sparsely-populated outlying areas). Further, even if people may consider themselves to be 'pro-life' - the group that votes mainly on abortion is far smaller.

The only reason that Right to Life gets in on endorsing people at these low levels is that they want to keep anyone who isn't agreeable to their agenda out of politics altogether. That is to say that they don't oppose a Ruth Kelly or a Rosalyn Bliss because they're worried about local policy on the issue: they oppose them because they don't want them to use the position as a stepping stone to a higher office where they might actually interact with the issue.

[Dan]

Grenade,
Your comments about this election to donna were wrong and way off. First, abortion does matter in these races (at least they do in the first and second ward). When Korndyke, the former (r) county commision member lost in the primary most all them votes went right over to Lagrand. Then you go on to say lagrand is the pro business guy, he was endorsed by the chamber, but he was also endorsed by almost every union in the city, that is where his biggest base of support is. Then you said Kelly, though i like her alot, is an education and social service canidate, the GR school board does education and the state and federal government works with social services not the city commision, if that was her true cause to run then she was running for the wrong seat and no wonder she lost.

[The Executive Director]

Hi, Grenade.

Your complaint is that candidates often pander to get votes. Certainly they do. It's still up to the voter to sort out if the candidate is sincere.

One measure of sincerity is whether or not the candidate received an endorsement from a group whose judgment the voter trusts. So I don't see how the fact that candidates pander argues against the utility of endorsements, even if the issue in question isn't front and center in a race.

Another complaint of yours appears to be the pervasiveness of the abortion issue unlike most other issues in current American politics. If so, I agree that abortion has a prominence that seems odd in comparison with taxes, crime, the environment, etc. But it is not unprecendented. Where a person stands on abortion cuts to the core of his beliefs in the same way slavery did in the two decades before the Civil War.

Like slavery, abortion stands a marker of which side one is one in an increasingly wide cultural divide. Because the culture is not just important but fundamental to society, this is why abortion resonants as an issue even in races for offices that have little authority to deal with the issue.

That is why groups like Right-to-Life AND their pro-abortion counterparts, the PWA, both into the business of endorsements in city commission races. No doubt that RTL would prefer that a pro-abortion candidate not ever win office, even at the city level, but then the same would be true of the PWA regarding pro-life candidates. So your last point cuts both ways.

Regards, Bill

[Rollnggrnade]

Dan -

1) I didn't say abortion doesn't matter; it does (though it shouldn't). What I'm saying is that it's not the sole determining factor for someone winning or losing an election in grand rapids.

2) If you believe otherwise, feel free to cite some poll statistics and prove me wrong. I'd happily yield if someone can validate this claim being made that the majority of the elections in Grand Rapids are decided solely by single-issue anti-abortion voters.

Given her education background, the GRPS Board would be a good place for Ruth Kelly - however Kelly is prohibited from running for the Grand Rapids School Board because she's a teacher. It's a conflict of interest - she would literally be voting on issues like her own compensation. She would have to retire from teaching in order to run. Furthermore, while education is one of her major issues - it's not the only one. She's long been an advocate for other quality-of-life issues than just education/social services so it's perfectly legitimate for her to run for City Commission.

[Rollnggrnade]

Bill,

It's not a "complaint," it's a citation of a reality of modern politics to counter your claim that one can make deep inferences about a candidate's future votes in office based on their pandering on one issue like abortion. You can't, and the trainwreck of so-called conservative republicans that have shredded the credibility of the republican party (setting it up for titanic losses in 2008) are a perfect example of that.

Your claim that you can draw a measure of sincerity from endorsements is especially false in the case of Right to Life of Michigan, which endorses candidates whether or not they ask them to; they don't even have an application process like most endorsement-granting bodies.

You can claim that Abortion is like slavery in terms of a moral 'point of no return' point, but it's not and the vast majority of the public has agreed for decades (in spite of an active and well-funded publicity campaign on the part of the anti-choice movement - something the slaves never had the benefit of). Moreover, it's a fraudulent framing of the issue. The people who support the continued legalization of abortion don't want abortions to happen, and they're not profiting from them (unlike the plantation owners). They want abortions to be rare; and they'd be overjoyed if there were never any more abortions ever again - which is why they put so much more of their resources into preventative measures like contraception and education (both of which have also historically been opposed by the same fundamentalist crowd that opposes abortion today).

The reality of that nuance was present in the era prior to the Civil War as well; because there were a plethora of reasons for and against slavery that had nothing to do with the actual im/morality of subjugating human beings.

I actually disagree. I think the Progressive Women's Alliance, unlike RTL, would be willing to overlook a candidate's position on abortion if he/she agreed with the majority of other issues that they're concerned with.

[The Executive Director]

My dear Grenade,

I understand that clear thinking is not the strong suit for liberals, but just naysaying what I wrote or calling me a fraud or ignorantly pinning labels like "fundamentalist" on those you disagree with isn't very persuasive.

What you still won't reckon with is that abortion, ESC research, and in vitro fertilization all involve the killing and/or the instrumentalizing of a human being. The best you offer is that embryonic human beings are not persons and so can be used or destroyed.

Of course, it is easier to justify the large-scale killing or enslavement of human beings by claiming they are not human or sub-human, like the Confederates, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis did to subjugate their fellow men -- and now supporters of abortion do.

There comes a point at which ignorance about the basic facts of human biology becomes willful ignorance to justify the killing of unborn children. That's inexcusable.

Regards, Bill