Hillary in the Middle

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democratic Senator from New York, has recently taken yet another position oldstyleliberal favors. According to "Shifting right, or there already?", an article at the MSNBC website, Sen. Clinton has joined forces

... with conservative Republican senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas and conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to tout their request for $90 million in federal funds for research on how the Internet, i-Pods, and other electronic media affect children's emotional and behavioral development. ... Hard-shelled cynics might portray her alliance with Santorum, Brownback and Lieberman as a Clinton shift to a more conservative stance, just as some have so interpreted her Jan. 25 speech which stressed the need for teenage sexual abstinence.

Not to mention her recent advocacy of compromise on the abortion issue (see my earlier post The Case for Abortion Compromise).

Senator Clinton's position on children and the media is mentioned in a recent TIME cover story, The Decency Police:

... earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum and Brownback to decry indecency in pop culture and call for a federal study of its effect on children.

There are two reasons why oldstyleliberal says three cheers for Hillary.

The first reason is that he agrees with social critics: TV (along with other media) has reached a tipping point and gone over an invisible line into hyper-raunchiness.

Now, oldstyleliberal does not favor censorship when it comes to what some call smut and others call free expression of sexual ideas (or of any other so-called "dangerous" ideas). oldstyleliberal has even been known to enjoy outright sleaze occasionally. He is, after all, a normal, red-blooded American male with definite prurient interests. (And by that statement he does not mean to exclude normal, red-blooded American females from having their own prurient interests, also.)

But when raunch and sleaze invade just about every program that is broadcast, of whatever category, at whatever time of day, oldstyleliberal says Whoa! Time out! Hold the mayo!

So he thinks Hillary is right to at least try to set up a federal commission to look into what can be done and why it needs to be done.

But there's a second reason he is in Hillary's corner on this one. To wit, he thinks the Senator from New York's reaching across the aisle, as it were, on issues like abortion, teenage sexual abstinence, and media sleaze makes her an ideal Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008.

This country needs its liberals to "shift right" somewhat, if they are to elect one of their own to the White House ever again. Entrenched positions at the left extreme of the ideological spectrum don't cut it these days. Compromise and accommodation are the order of the day.

As oldstyleliberal mentioned in You Go, Hillary!, Senator Clinton not long ago lectured on "Women and Leadership in the 21st Century" at the Panetta Institute. In taking questions from host Leon Panetta and from the audience, she bemoaned the loss of a spirit of compromise and bipartisan consensus in Congress today. It appears she has decided to not only talk that kind of talk, but to walk the walk as well.

Imagine it is 2008. Hillary continues to be the hands-down favorite for the Democratic nomination, actually gets the nod ... and then goes on to win the Oval Office. Given Americans' recent penchant for divided government, the Republicans will very likely retain control of both houses of Congress. What kind of liberal Democratic president would be better-suited to working with a right-wing GOP legislative branch than one who, like Senator Clinton, has established her bona fides as credibly "shifting right" when the occasion demands it?

That's oldstyleliberal's second reason for lining up with Hillary on the topic of what media sleaze does to our kids: it bodes well for her anticipated presidential bid in 2008!

The Case for Abortion Compromise

Andrew Sullivan has a fine essay in the March 7, 2005, issue of TIME Magazine on the need for liberals to join conservatives on "doing all we can to ensure that fewer and fewer women exercise" their right to an abortion.

In "The Case for Compromise on Abortion," Sullivan lauds Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for leading the way in her recent speech to pro-choice advocates:

She said something so obvious and so right it's amazing it has taken this long for it to be uttered: whatever side you're on in the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate, we surely all want to lower the number of abortions. Whether you believe that an abortion is a difficult medical procedure for a woman or whether, like me, you believe that all abortions are an immoral taking of human life, we can all agree on a third principle: we would be better off with fewer of them.

Sullivan then goes on to point out that the conservatives in his hoped-for coalition against the frequency of abortion are likely to blanch at such alternatives as "expanded access to contraception," repugnant to many Catholics. Also, at expanding adoption efforts to include gay couples.

Additionally, Sullivan worries that conservatives will be loath to reduce abortion's frequency all that much, in that "their argument for making it completely illegal may become less salient."

Too bad that he ignores parallel drawbacks from the point of view of dedicated pro-choice liberals (who oldstyleliberal thinks need to take their heads out of the ground). Columnist Ellen Goodman, in one of her columns, wrote of Hillary's speech:

Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?

It also occurs to oldstyleliberal that liberals might themselves object to a drastically reduced number of abortions making their pro-choice adamancy less salient. If abortion demand were to dwindle, why would abortion need to remain legal?

So here we have exactly the sort of situation which oldstyleliberal feels points up how his style of liberalism differs from the knee-jerk form prevalent today, as well as from knee-jerk conservatism.

The difference lies in the willingness to compromise, to take a both-and approach rather than an either-or approach.

From Andrew Sullivan's standpoint, America's leadership should damp down the feuding over whether abortion should be wholly unconstitutional and illegal or should be wholly unrestricted and available on demand.

Leave the contentious issue of Roe v. Wade for one minute, quit the ideological bickering about when life begins for a while, take down the barricades, and craft a strategy that assumes abortion will be legal for the foreseeable future, but try to reduce it.

The feuding does not reduce the number of abortions in America by one single abortion. It's in service to entrenched and opposed ideological positions, not to what oldstyleliberal thinks ought to be the watchword of our politics: empowering people.

The Hillary Compromise — Sullivan, in fleshing it out, calls it "the pro-choice, pro-life compromise," but that's too ungainly — would empower women to pursue one or more of several non-abortion strategies: abstinence, which "can work for some women"; increased access to contraception, valuable especially for sexually active teens, as promoted by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's proposed Prevention First Act; expanded adoption alternatives, including gay couples. Another possibility not mentioned by Sullivan would be programs that support single motherhood.

In this way, the Hillary Compromise looks like a triumph of pragmatism and people empowerment over entrenched, people-be-damned- there's-something-more-important-at-stake-here ideology. And that suits oldstyleliberal just fine.