Obama at Notre Dame
By Jennifer J. Foster
All the buzz this weekend was about President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame.
As you know, I had high praise for Obama’s first commencement address, delivered to graduates of Arizona State University on Wednesday night. I was interested to see what the president would do in the Notre Dame situation, and if he would use the debate over abortion as the springboard for his speech, as he had done with the debate over his honorary degree at ASU.
He did.
If you missed the address, you can watch it here (it’s in three parts) or read the transcript here.
My take on the speech was that it offered nothing new. While Obama always says the right things about bringing people with differing viewpoints together on this issue, he has no credibility as far as taking steps to recognize and respect those differing points of view. He has had several chances already in his young presidency to strike a more moderate tone on the abortion issue, but at every turn, he has taken a liberal stance. Choosing Kathleen Sebelius to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is but one example.
NPR reported in advance of Obama’s Notre Dame speech that although the president has brought together folks on opposite sides of this debate to try to find areas where they can agree, these efforts have largely gone underreported or unreported at all. As a result, they’ve gone almost completely unnoticed.
Why? If this is President Obama’s good-faith effort to try to help people find common ground on a difficult issue—perhaps the most difficult issue—facing this country, why isn’t he doing it publicly?
And why didn’t he mention those efforts in his speech at Notre Dame?
The bottom line, for me, is this: President Obama talks a good game on taking a moderate poosition on abortion, and his speech Sunday was no exception to that M.O. But the record shows that his record doesn’t match his rhetoric.
Looking forward, we’ll have more opportunities to see whether the president is interested in truly staking out a moderate abortion position that upholds his beliefs about it without disrespecting those with whom he disagrees. The foremost example of this, of course, is the looming Supreme Court nomination. We will be able to tell a lot—a lot—about Obama’s approach with his pick. But also on the horizon is another look at the Hyde Amendment, a longstanding congressional provision that forbids Medicaid funds from being used for abortion.
If President Obama seeks to lift the Hyde Amendment, we’ll know that he has no respect at all for American taxpayers who oppose abortion—and we’ll have irrefutable confirmation that, his rhetoric notwithstanding, he has no interest in being a moderate on this issue.
