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Democrats? In Utah
by Gordon S. Jones, Draper
Democrats in Utah and other western states perennially complain that they are miscast as clones of the national Democratic Party. Sure, they admit, national Democrats are liberal on social and economic issues, but we’re not like that. We are not pro-abortion, not bent on a radical promotion of the homosexual agenda, and we’re actually more fiscally conservative even than Republicans.
Unfortunately, reality obtrudes, as it did with some stories surrounding the Utah State Democratic Convention last weekend.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was the featured speaker at the “How the West Will Be Won” barbecue Friday night. I have not been able to find an actual transcript of the speech, but the news stories paraphrase Reid as saying Democratic “party leaders need to be more aggressive, challenging conservative characterizations of liberals as purveyors of abortion, gay marriage and secularism.” This is the ritual disclaimer mentioned above. In the case of Reid, Senator from an adjoining state, and (as the news stories always mention) the highest-ranking Mormon in the Democratic Party, it might claim even more legitimacy, except…
Except for obtruding reality. In this case, Reid’s comments to a high school civics class in Las Vegas earlier in the day.
A fair amount of ink, photons, and electrons has been expended over Reid’s characterization of President George W. Bush as “a loser” and “a bad president,” but less (and none that I’ve seen in Utah) over his attack on the qualifications of the judicial nominees being filibustered in the U.S. Senate at the direction of Harry Reid.
Again, let’s bypass Reid’s rhetorical excesses (“they’re bad people,” Texas Supreme Court Justice Patricia Owen is “the worst of the worst,” and California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown “wants to take us back to the Civil War days”) and focus on the one substantive criticism he makes of these nominees: (quoting the Las Vegas Review Journal paraphrase again) “some [of the nominees] were opposed to the 1973 Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortion.” *
So there you have it. Harry Reid asks us non-Democrat Utahns to get past the identification of Democrats with the abortion issue just three hours after he has cited it as the reason for his obstruction of President Bush’s judicial nominees.
There is no record of any of the 900 Democrats in the Salt Lake Marriott Center pointing out that Senator Reid’s rhetoric can do nothing but reinforce our perception that despite the protestations of local Democrats, the reality is that Democratic Party is a party whose policies and values are unacceptable to a substantial majority of Utahns, to a slightly smaller majority of Westerners, and to a significant (in electoral terms) majority of Americans in general.
When even a Mormon from Nevada feels compelled to apply the pro-abortion litmus test, Democrats have little prospect of convincing us that they are just like Republicans, but with softer hearts.
* Reid did make a second “substantive” point, accusing some of the nominees of (quoting the LVRJ) “trying to dismantle government programs like Social Security.” Possibly some of the “bad” judges (for whom Harry Reid voted when they were nominated to the federal district courts by the way) have had occasion to rule in cases involving Social Security, but it seems unlikely, and even more unlikely that any “dismantling” of Social Security could have been at issue. More likely, Senator Reid’s tongue outran his sense, as it did a few weeks ago when he criticized Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s legal writing and then was unable to produce any creditable example of such bad writing.
Posted by Editor on May 16, 2005 07:55 AM
