God and Hillary Clinton (31 page)

Liberals may want to dismiss the abortion issue as a mere concern of right-wing “fundamentalists” who watch
The 700 Club
. Yet this issue extends way beyond Pat Robertson Republicans. It goes to Reagan Democrats, to blue-collar Democrats, to Blue Dog Democrats, to Southern Democrats, to Catholic Democrats, to Pennsylvania and Ohio and Iowa and Michigan Democrats and those in other traditional swing states.

One religious Democrat—perhaps the country's foremost—with his pulse on the issue is former President Jimmy Carter. On November 3, 2005, Carter was in Washington to promote his book
Our Enduring Values
. He spoke to reporters over breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “I never have felt that any abortion should be committed,” said the former Democratic president, to the shock and dismay of the reporters. “I think each abortion is the result of a series of errors.”
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Hillary might have even considered going that far herself, though she never would have dared to say what Carter said next: “I've never been convinced, if you let me inject my Christianity into it, that Jesus Christ would approve abortion.” Carter went on: “I have always thought that it was not in the mainstream of the American public to be extremely liberal on many issues. I think our party's leaders—some of them—are overemphasizing the abortion issue.” He surely had Senator Clinton in mind.

There are recent data to back this. A March 2006 Zogby poll further illustrated what has been evident for a long time: Hillary Clinton's abortion stridency may be a smash on Broadway, but it does not play in Peoria; it works for her in blue states like New York, but is a loser in red states like Nebraska—and she needs red states to be elected president. The Zogby poll found Americans strongly disagreeing with Mrs. Clinton on abortion matters like parental notification (by ratios of two to one for girls under eighteen, and three
to one for girls under sixteen), federal funding for abortions abroad (more than three to one), and much more. By a ratio of two to one (59 percent to 29 percent), Americans believe that “abortion ends a human life.” The poll, commissioned by Associated Television News President Brad O'Leary, prompted O'Leary to remark that the results “spell disaster for Democrats who try to run on the abortion issue. The abortion issue is this year's ‘third rail' for congressional Democrats and for Hillary Clinton in 2008.”
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But while abortion is a significant religious issue, it is not the only religious issue. A barometer of what Mrs. Clinton can expect to confront as she pursues the nation's highest office as a pro-choice Christian is the experience of the rising Democratic Party star who holds the junior Senate seat in Mrs. Clinton's home state, one whom she respects very much and who initially excited her greatly: Barack Obama.

Before
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama's best-selling book in late 2006, and before his sudden emergence as a near neck-and-neck rival with Hillary in early presidential polls, Obama gave an important speech on religion, a prelude to the freshman senator's surge in the months and year ahead. Specifically, in a June 28, 2006, address to the annual gathering of the Call to Renewal convention in Washington, Obama made a heartfelt appeal to religious voters on behalf of liberal Christian politicians.
²⁷
E. J. Dionne, a
Washington Post
columnist with a special interest in religion and the politics of the Democratic Party, claimed that Obama's “eloquent faith” might have produced “the most important pronouncement by a Democrat on faith and politics since John F. Kennedy's Houston speech in 1960 declaring his independence from the Vatican.”
²⁸

Obama is a Christian, and has been since leaving college. Yet, in the 2004 Senate race in Illinois, it was Obama's support of abortion in particular—and also gay marriage—that prompted his opponent, conservative Republican Alan Keyes, to assert that Jesus would not cast a vote for Obama. Obama later admitted that “Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me.”
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Obama protested the charge, stating in his speech that there were certain issues that not only proved his Christianity but on which liberal Christian politicians generally could affirm their religiosity, if not turn the tables on conservative Christians—issues like supporting day care facilities and opposing the repeal of the estate tax. Such examples are commonly cited by liberal Christians; others include supporting a hike in the minimum wage, cleaning up the environment, and opposing tax cuts across the board—all part of the “social justice” mosaic of the religious left. There is, however, a major flaw in these pleas, frequently missed by liberal Christians:

Liberal and conservative Christians alike fully agree that Jesus wants them to help the poor. Yet they can easily, respectfully disagree over whether the estate tax or government-funded day care is what Jesus had in mind. Conservative Christians prefer to address poverty through individual outreach, nonprofit and faith-based organizations, and primarily the private sector; citing Scripture, they believe that Jesus pushed for private means of assistance. For example, the parable of the rich man getting into heaven calls not for a government program of forced wealth distribution but for the rich man to personally choose to share his wealth. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, favor public sector solutions, many of which their conservative counterparts find ineffective.

In short, this is a legitimate disagreement over means toward an agreed-upon end. Christian Democrats can scream in frustration over why conservative Christians will not vote for them as they uphold these social justice issues; as Michael Lerner has noted, there is even a tendency on the left to call such people on the right “stupid.” Yet the intellectual flaw here is not in the mind of the conservative Christian. The mistake is to conclude that Jesus Christ would prefer an upper-income marginal tax rate of 36 percent instead of 31 percent. No Christian Democrat can claim to know that.

Similarly, all Christians agree that Jesus wants them to be good stewards of the earth, but no American politician can presume to
know with absolute sureness whether Jesus would support the Kyoto Treaty or drilling for oil in the Persian Gulf but not in Alaska. All Christians agree it is wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of their race, but neither Democrat nor Republican can divine His precise will on quotas in admissions policy at the University of Michigan or on school vouchers in Milwaukee.

That said, there is a point where pro-choice Christian politicians like Obama and Mrs. Clinton reach a minefield: Conservative and liberal Christians alike agree that Jesus does not want them to kill the innocent. The disconnect between the two sides on abortion is over the view of the pro-life conservative Christian who cites the preeminence of the humanity of the unborn child, vs. the pro-choice liberal Christian who points to the preeminence of the mother's right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy. That is the split, one which pro-life Christians feel is serious enough to make the pro-choice Christian at the least deeply confused and, according to some voices, like Alan Keyes's, even un-Christian; as a result, they will not cast a vote for a pro-choice Christian politician.

For many pro-life Christians, a legal abortion at twenty weeks for the purpose of birth control is not a matter of compromise, and is a far more significant barometer of one's Christian commitment than whether one advocates an increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $5.45. They view the latter “social justice” concern as utterly insignificant by comparison.

This explains the statements of Alan Keyes toward Barack Obama. And Keyes, whom liberals feel is an extremist, represents a large segment of pro-life Christians. Such pro-lifers are not strong enough to lose Illinois or New York or California for Mrs. Clinton, but they can cost her Indiana, Missouri, the entire South, and sixty of Pennsylvania's sixty-seven counties.

Former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, committed to the Democratic Party to the grave and a pro-lifer whom President Bill Clinton appointed U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, talked to the
National
Catholic Register
about fellow Democrats like Obama (and Mrs. Clinton): “They talk like there's a big tent here in the Democratic Party. And then the next thing you know, when it's time for the political process to begin, they exclude pro-life Democrats like me.” The Clintons in particular have been excluding pro-life Democrats since the 1992 convention, when they barred Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey from speaking.
³⁰

Like Mrs. Clinton, Obama in his talk spoke of changing the way they talk about religion, but as Flynn noted, however, “It's not about rhetoric, it's about substance.”
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To think that rhetoric alone will win the day is to be guilty of the first of all sins: pride. Only pride could convince one that his or her opponents are so lacking in mental fiber as to be swayed by a shift in rhetoric but not substance. Mrs. Clinton should do what she did in her youthful days at Park Ridge when it came to civil rights: Take a ride to areas where she normally did not go and meet with people whom she was not like, dialogue with them, integrate with them, and not segregate herself in a way that allowed her to stereotype those on the other side in a simplistic way that demeaned them. After all, she did travel all the way to Calcutta to cooperate with a diminutive nun who told her that abortion was “evil” and that “life is the most beautiful gift of God.”
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Matt Bai raised an intriguing possibility in the
New York Times Magazine
: that Hillary Rodham Clinton, if elected president, could catalyze a transformation within the Democratic Party, leading liberals into a kind of “new Democratic moralism,” a “moral crusade.” “Hillary [could] be the one,” wrote Bai, “to remind baby-boom Democrats that most Americans believe in fixed points of right and wrong, both abroad and at home.”
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Could Hillary chart the way to a new Promised Land for Democrats, where the party sheds its well-earned image as the Secular Party?

That would indeed be quite a development. And she may make the effort. We can expect, for instance, a high-profile address by Mrs. Clinton on the subject of faith and politics well before November
2008, one aimed at attracting lots of publicity, which it would receive, and touted by an unthoughtful secular press that has suddenly found religion and no longer objects to fusing faith and politics, at least until the next George W. Bush comes along.

Again, however, such a transformation will require a shift in policy, not just rhetoric. Can the Democratic Party cast off the image of the Secular Party when it is increasingly perceived, as Ramesh Ponnuru has alluded, as the Party of Death, a party that supports not merely no limits on abortion but on embryonic research and euthanasia? That is the rub for Hillary.

 

Like the current president, Hillary Rodham Clinton is a big believer in intercessory prayer. “[N]ot only do I believe in it, I think there is increasing evidence of it,” she says, pointing to the miraculous: “There is an interesting hospital study in which patients of comparable medical condition were prayed for, and prayers were, apparently, the only difference that could be discovered between how the patients were treated.”
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As for herself personally, she says that she has “a lot of special prayers, and you know I rely on those in my daily life…. I carry a lot of them with me, but it's not something I really talk about. Except I would say this: There is just a real opportunity for people, through regular prayer and contemplation or just taking a few minutes out to think about themselves, to gain strength. And if it becomes a habit, it's always there for you. And I just hope more people, whatever their religious faith or spiritual beliefs might be, would try that. It can provide a great source of strength.”
³⁵

Hillary looks for wisdom as a component of her Christian faith and personal growth. “When I went to Sunday school years ago our books often talked about how Jesus grew in wisdom and stature,” she says. “I think about that often because it is unlikely I will grow any
further in stature, but I certainly hope I will grow more in wisdom as the years go by.”
³⁶

Time will only tell where such growth ultimately takes her, politically and spiritually. In the meantime, however, as she pursues the presidency, and seeks that middle-of-the-road voter as earnestly as her husband did in two successful presidential elections—and as she likely positions herself as the most religious Democratic front-runner since Jimmy Carter—it will be important that she be candid about where she stands as a Christian politician, and for the media to portray her accurately so the public can understand her correctly, even when it does not serve the interests of her supporters in the press.

Liberals and conservatives alike want clarity. Norman Lear, founder of the liberal group People for the American Way, is sick and tired of false advertising: “I love her,” he said of Hillary. “But as terrific as I think she is, my concern is that we need someone who will tell the truth as they see it all of the time. She, like all of them, is not somebody who does that.”
³⁷

Perhaps in this campaign Hillary's Christian compass that demands boldly proclaiming truth will override that Clintonian tendency to say certain things merely to get elected. That would not be out of the realm of Hillary Rodham Clinton's universe, especially for a woman never afraid to speak her mind, one who, though remaining a Methodist, has unfolded various wrinkles on that road from Hugh Rodham to Don Jones to Barry Goldwater to Bill Clinton, from Wellesley to Washington, from Michael Lerner to Jean Houston to Mother Teresa, from the stage of that Christmas pageant at Park Ridge Methodist to the pulpit of African-American congregations in Harlem.