Washington -- Last week, as the Clinton team counterpunched on the nomination of Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. as surgeon general, White House officials insisted they were stunned to see the clout the anti-abortion movement has within the Republican Party.
"It was difficult to imagine that the Republican majority would become seized [by] the very confrontational tactics of the right-to-life movement and allow that to dominate their consideration of the nomination," said the White House press secretary, Mike McCurry. He decried the "litmus test" conservatives were employing against Dr. Foster because he'd performed abortions and served on the board of Planned Parenthood.
"All of a sudden, when the extremists who want to criminalize a woman's right to choose start pushing buttons and pulling strings, then [Republicans] start dancing around," added Vice President Al Gore.
Republicans, whether "pro-life" or "pro-choice," found these statements astonishing. Abortion has been the source of huge public battles at each Republican national convention in the last 15 years. It has helped some GOP presidential candidates -- and hurt others -- and has been the driving issue in the widely publicized takeovers of various state Republican steering committees by Christian evangelicals all over the country.
On the other side of the spectrum, Democrats have used their support of abortion rights in local and statewide elections all over the country.
The Democratic National Committee has tried to exploit the perceived Republican stridency on abortion to raise money, to attract new members and to recruit candidates.
Thus, it's tempting to dismiss the White House line as nothing more than an obvious attempt to take the attention off its own missteps on the Foster nomination.
But dismissing these remarks as obvious partisan rhetoric, in a sense, takes the White House off the hook.
As impossible as it may seem, they were surprised in the Clinton White House at the vehement opposition among Senate Republicans to a surgeon general who had performed abortions. This surprise illustrates not only what is wrong with the way the national debate over abortion is being conducted, but also what many observers of politics believe is wrong with the two major political parties:
They talk past each other, not to each other, on important issues. They stifle dissent within their own ranks. They take their cues from single-interest groups rather than search for common ground.
'The extremists dominate'
"There's this ideological rigidity in American politics on this issue. . . . It is one of those areas where the extremists dominate," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate Democratic-leaning think tank.
"I have always found it bizarre, that we ask a Supreme Court appointee about a single issue," Mr. Marshall says. "Not whether they have the character and wisdom to dispense justice. How they stand on abortion. Our politics has been commandeered by the interest groups."
In 1980, a well-organized coalition of Protestant evangelicals, anti-abortion activists and other cultural conservatives surprised old-line Republican activists meeting in Detroit at the party's nominating convention by fashioning a party platform that committed the GOP to a series of conservative positions on so-called "traditional values" issues.
"The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed," it states. In addition, the Republican platform calls for an end to all government funding of abortions, the appointment of federal judges who respect "the sanctity of innocent human life" and the passage of a "human life amendment" that bans all abortions.
No exceptions are mentioned, not for rape, not for incest, not even to protect the life of the mother.
Clearly, this stance energized social conservatives. Heeding such groups as the Moral Majority, the National Right to Life Committee and the Eagle Forum, evangelicals turned out to vote in record numbers in the 1980 election -- and a majority went for Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter, one of their own.
At the same time, polls show that only about 12 percent of the public want a total ban on legal abortions.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party also was succumbing to the temptation of coalition politics. The Democrats courted -- and were courted by -- such groups as the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League.
To these groups, Roe vs. Wade is untouchable, and no state has any right to tamper with it. The states shouldn't be requiring spousal or parental notification provisions. They shouldn't require waiting periods, set limits on which trimester and abortion can be performed or encourage women to choose adoption or some other course.
This became the national Democratic Party's official stance. But a view of abortion rights this absolute is adhered to by fewer than 10 percent of the people in the land, according to numerous public opinion surveys.
Thus, the only two major political parties in the country solidified themselves into positions that left approximately 80 percent of the populace -- the 80 percent whose views of abortion had more shades of gray -- without any real voice.
"Sometimes parties stake out places they want to take the country," says Gary Bauer, an abortion opponent who heads the conservative Family Research Council. "But it's true that on this issue the public is somewhere else than the parties."
But Finley Peter Dunne, who created the sage Chicago bartender Mr. Dooley a hundred years ago, observed once that "the Supreme Court follows the election returns." And maybe the justices read polls, too. In 1992, when a branch of government finally split some of the differences on the issue of abortion, it wasn't the Congress or the White House and it certainly wasn't the Republicans or the Democrats. It was the high court.
The case was Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, a test of whether a state could restrict abortion. Pennsylvania required doctors to give a woman seeking an abortion a litany of facts about a fetus and about the alternatives to abortion. The state also called for a 24-hour waiting period and required minors to notify their parents or a judge.
The high court upheld these strictures, but it threw out the Pennsylvania requirement that a married woman inform her husband of the operation, a part of the decision applauded by women's rights groups.
The Casey case gets its name from former Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey, a devout Roman Catholic and one the few prominent Democratic officials in the United States who outspokenly opposes abortion.
The summer of the Pennsylvania decision, Mr. Casey wanted to address the 1992 Democratic convention. Mr. Clinton and the party chief, Ronald H. Brown, didn't want him speaking to the delegates. Instead, a Republican who favors abortion rights was selected to address the convention.
Abortion over party
In other words, the Democratic Party sent a clear signal that fealty to the abortion rights position was more important to Democrats than even party affiliation itself. In doing so, the Democrats in New York projected an eerie mirror image of the Republicans.
In 1991, Republican activist Ann Stone formed an organization, Republicans for Choice, that sought to moderate the Republicans' abortion plank in the upcoming election year. Ms. Stone predicted that the uncompromising anti-abortion language would alienate younger, professional Republican women.
She was treated as a pariah by her own party in the year leading up to the GOP convention in Houston. Fearing a divisive fight, President Bush's forces stacked the platform committee with social conservatives who would not tamper with the uncompromising anti-abortion language of previous conventions.
Mr. Bush got his wish, but it came at a cost: Many lifelong Republican activists said later they felt out of place at their own convention.
This is the political environment Dr. Henry Foster was thrust into.
Carl M. Cannon is a reporter in the Washington Bureau of The Baltimore Sun.