[StBernard] Conservative Review - The News That Didn't Happen

[Westley Annis]

The News That Didn't Happen
by Paul Greenberg

Sometimes what says most about a country, a society, and an 
age isn't what happens in the news but what doesn't. For 
example: 

When the president of the United States spoke at Notre Dame 
the other Sunday, he didn't so much speak about abortion as 
around it. He finessed the whole troubling issue by saying 
he hoped we could all agree to find common ground between...
what, exactly? Pro-choice and pro-life? Abortion and 
opposition to it? Good and evil? 

Barack Obama settled for suggesting that we all do the best 
we can, like supporting adoption and new mothers. Who would 
take issue with that? There's no way to disagree with a 
stand not taken. And yet what he said seemed to strike a 
chord. Never underestimate the power of the platitudinous. 

People really don't want to be troubled by all that 
business anyway. When a president declines to take a stand 
on some great issue, it may come as a kind of relief. 
Especially if he can make moral neutrality sound elevated, 
statesmanlike, above-the-fray. Let's all just calm down 
and put this issue in perspective. It's only a matter of 
life and death. 

Many a politician has had a highly successful career avoid-
ing the basic issues in the most appealing, articulate way. 
Some manage to get by with it their whole lives, and are 
even acclaimed for it. Why not just put off the really 
tough questions forever? Maybe they'll go away. 

Consider how long Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant of 
American politics in his time, managed to evade the moral 
ramifications of the slavery issue, which threatened to 
tear the Union apart (and eventually did). Sen. Douglas 
dodged the issue with verve and style year after year -- 
till events and an ungainly Whig lawyer out of Springfield, 
Ill., caught up with him. Some questions just will not be 
evaded forever. 

But some politicians are very good at soft-pedaling the 
great questions of their time. Only after the applause 
had died away at Notre Dame and the president was on the 
way to his next photo-op might it have occurred to anyone 
to wonder why, if his speech there had been so effective, 
it left behind a vague sense of dissatisfaction. As if he 
hadn't really addressed the question. Indeed, that's the 
rhetorician's term for this technique: begging the 
question. And it can be done in style. 

The president did the politic thing at Notre Dame. Side-
stepping the issue, he took refuge in Bill Clinton's smooth 
old formula about just wanting to make abortion safe, legal 
and rare. Even though that kind of passive acquiescence in 
abortion has resulted in its becoming anything but rare in 
this country. At least among poor black and Hispanic women. 
They tend to have abortions out of all proportion to their 
numbers. But that is not the kind of fact likely to excite 
the interest of the country's political elites; indeed, 
they may be all in favor of population control, at least 
for certain minorities. 

Meanwhile, despite his outward neutrality on the issue, the 
president's actual policies encourage abortion by financing 
it under cover of popular euphemisms like Family Planning 
or Women's Health or, on the Chinese mainland, the One-
Child Policy. Abortion's supporters have learned not to be 
too specific about what is actually going on. Why go into 
the graphic details? 

The president was anything but specific at Notre Dame, and 
-- at least politically -- his approach worked out well. 
There may have been a few protesters here and there, but 
most were politely tolerated rather than directly engaged. 
The casual observer might even have wondered what they were 
protesting. It wasn't as if the president were actually 
saying anything. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator of 
his time, Barack Obama is proving the Great Equivocator of 
his. 

The net result of the president's appearance at Notre Dame 
was to make him appear quite sensible -- and abortion quite 
acceptable, or at least no reason for alarm, or maybe even 
for concern. Can't we all just get along, or at least agree 
to avoid the hard questions? After all, if one of the 
country's leading Catholic universities can honor a 
president whose policies promote abortion, what could be 
so bad about taking innocent life? 

Abortion now becomes just one more debatable question among 
so many in politics, like how much the government should 
spend or whether labor unions should be allowed to organize 
plants without a secret ballot. Why all the fuss? 

If the American presidency really is what Teddy Roosevelt 
called it -- a bully pulpit -- it might as well have been 
empty last weekend. The church stilled its voice and the 
president said nothing at length with all due ceremony. 
And everybody could be at ease in Zion. 

The surest way to win acceptance for any morally or ethic-
ally dubious practice is to accustom people to think of 
it as no big deal, just politics. Which is why the most 
significant aspect of the president's appearance at Notre 
Dame is that it had no moral significance at all. Beyond 
all the handshakes and nice gestures, nothing was happen-
ing. The moral numbness of American society remained 
undisturbed. And that may have been the only real news.