In this blogger’s opinion Obama won the debate with a measured response to the question of abortion. The instapproval graph also liked his health care plan (they hated McCain’s unhappy-mayor-from-The-Nightmare-before-Christmas attack face), but the point about finding common ground on abortions maxed the squiggles and kept them there until he stopped talking.
The basic thrust of Obama’s point went like this:
Planned Parenthood and the (more reasonable) Lifers have the same basic agenda: reduce the frequency of abortions. Family planning and birth control moots the question of casual abortion by putting women in control of their own reproductive agenda. Why not sell it that way? Peel off the Life groups who will cooperate on community-health strategies to reduce abortions through planning and highlight the extremism of the Lifers who won’t cooperate. At this point we’ve got more than enough public health studies to know for a fact which approaches in fact reduce abortion rates and which do not. Reframe the debate so that the moderate and rational opponents of abortion have more in common with us than they do with the bombers and other freakshows.
That wasn’t a quote from tonight, it was a bit of strategery that when I was just another commenter at Kos*. It was my only rec’d diary (sniffle), and in my opinion anyway the whole thing makes a great read. The basic point was to strategize about what Dems should do if we won a crushing victory in 2004 (foresight!), but really it was a diary about Barack Obama. His 2004 convention speech moved the hell out of me, so I wrote a diary proposing how Dems can win an enduring majority by following in the spirit that Obama laid out instead of the spiteful path of Rove.
It sucks that Kerry didn’t win, but instead I can watch a black guy with a muslim name eat the Republicans’ lunch using a strategy that I envisioned after watching a speech by him. It’s nice to think that I’m a little bit in tune with the guy who could be our next JFK.
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(*) About the Kos pseud – I picked Tom Frank back when Kos has 10,000 users and I didn’t know about that other guy. I felt embarrassed when I found out, but by then I wasn’t about to give up the sweet user ID#.