Slate features pro-life women who used to vote on the single issue alone and are now voting for Obama despite their beliefs. Meanwhile I’ve been going in the opposite direction. I’ve gone from thinking voting on a single issue was silly to now thinking that maybe some issues (war, torture, abortion) are important enough. What has George Bush done to the Republican party?
It isn’t that Turnbach’s stand on abortion has shifted any, she says. But her view of the Republican Party’s commitment to seeing Roe overturned has: “Even if McCain does get in, he’s not going to do anything” that would lead to a reversal of Roe. The legality of abortion “is not going to change,” she’s concluded, “and I really don’t think it should be an issue” in this presidential race.
Like others who told me they had based their vote on the single issue of abortion the last two times around, Turnbach’s says her ’08 calculus takes other matters—like the economy, the economy and the economy—into account: “McCain was on my nerves the other night, prancing around” at the debate in Nashville, she says, while Obama” strikes her as “level-headed, intelligent, and someone who doesn’t fly off the handle; I like him.” Age is another strike against McCain in her view: “McCain is so old,” says Turnbach, who is retired. “If he passed away, we’d have someone so inexperienced it’s scary.” Most of her pro-life friends who went for Bush in 2000 and 2004 are also Obama grandmamas now, she says, including one who is really sweating the switch but “doesn’t think McCain is mentally stable.”
Leave a comment