What she doesn’t say

— Football may be the equivalent of an established church in these latitudes, but politics can be quite a spectator sport, too. It’s a joy to watch a particularly smooth political operator advance like a broken-field runner in agile action. The art lies as much, perhaps more, in the feint as the actual move. Watching from up here in the cheap seats, the fan of politics learns to savor not just what’s happening down on the field but what isn’t, and to hear not just what’s being said but what isn’t.

Consider the artful pivot of Joyce Elliott, the veteran state legislator now running for Congress in this state’s Second District. Her record in the Ledge is that of a confirmed liberal-excuse me, progressive. Having secured the Democratic nomination by marshaling her base in Little Rock, she’s now running to the center as she faces Tim Griffin, a veteran of Republican politics who seems thoroughly in tune with the conservative, anti-incumbent mood this election year.

Joyce Elliott, however, isn’t about to betagged as some kind of radical out of step with most of the voters in her district. To hear her tell it, she’s just a mainstream politician dedicated to all the usual, unexceptionable goals-education, health care, good-paying jobs, fiscal accountability . . . Ain’t nobody here but us moderates.

That’s her story and she’s goingto stick with it till election day-probably in her usual, feisty way. One thing that makes watching this broken-field runner in nimble action is how much she enjoys her own performance. Like any would-be rhetorician, she can’t resist using a zesty phrase-even if it may come back to haunt her. (Some of us know all about that, which is why writing a newspaper column so appeals.) Nothing may spoil such a display of political agility like a look at what the candidate doesn’t say. For example, asked how she would vote on the card-check bill, the unions’ latest ploy to organize workplaces without necessarily giving the workers a say in the matter, Joyce Elliott assures us she’s against the bill’s provision that would eliminate the secret ballot in such elections. So far, so prudent. The secret ballot rises to the level of an ethical question in a democracy, and can’t be dodged forever-as Bill Halter discovered even in his union-backed campaign for the Senate.

But whether Joyce Elliott is for the rest of the unions’ bill remains murky. It’s not clear whether she would support an even more dangerous provision that would replace negotiation between labor and management with mandatory government arbitration at some stage-and so make those negotiations pretty pointless.

Much like Bill Halter, she’ll have to decide: Is she her own person or the unions’, including the teachers’ unions whose line she’s long toed? Or maybe she can evade the question more successfully than he did. She’s even smoother than he was.

For many of us, there is a kind of jagged moral lightning that may strike suddenly and illuminate the decision before us in an instant, even the hardest and loneliest decision. But the smoothest politicians, always calculating their next move, may escape any such moment of truth. They thrive best in the semi-darkness of ordinary times, when even life-and-death issues can be obscured as familiarity breeds . . . boredom.

Take an issue like abortion, for example. Joyce Elliott’s been mighty quiet about it in this campaign for someone who’s supposed to be outspoken. A look at her record on the subject as a legislator indicates she’s never said a word or cast a vote against abortion. On the contrary, she couldn’t rouse herself even to vote on a bill to require parental consent in this state before an abortion is performed on a minor. Nor did she manage to cast a vote for or against the semiinfanticide known as partial-birth abortion.

To judge by such votes, Senator Elliott is determined to remain neutral between right and wrong, life and death. Was it Dante who reserved a special place in his Inferno for those who abstain on the great moral questions oftheir times? If so, it must be full to overflowing with cagey politicians.

It’s what Joyce Elliott doesn’t say that may say most. But there was a time, when she was still a state rep rather than state senator, that Ms. Elliott took her stand foursquare against life, not to mention women’s health. Hers was one ofthe votes against a bill that established standards for administering RU-486, the controversial abortion drug that had mixed-and dangerous-results even while it was still being tested.

The state’s medical society had no objections to the bill, which would have required that any doctor prescribing RU-486 be able to handle an incomplete abortion, which the drug was known to induce; be able to have a patient admitted to a hospital if complications ensued; be certified in the use of ultra-sound techniques in order to make sure the baby wasn’t too far along before being destroyed; and complete a course in the drug’s use. All of which sounds eminently responsible.

But not to Joyce Elliott, who spoke forcefully against it: “For us to continue to throw up obstacles and interject ourselves between a woman and her doctor, I submit, is going too far.” Hmmm. Are the rest of us supposed to pretend that no one else is involved in this decision, no matter what the sonogram shows? Are we all supposed to step aside rather than protect that life, let alone the health of the mother?

Much has changed in the unending debate over abortion in this country as one scientific advance after another has confirmed the old moral arguments against it. It becomes harder and harder for advocates of abortion to deny that they are destroying a human life worthy of our protection.

It would be a welcome sign that Senator Elliott is capable of change, and growth, if she were to end her support, whether passive or active, for abortion and join the ranks of those who fight for life. Then she wouldn’t just be playing politics, however smoothly. Here’s hoping she’ll forget ideology and just speak out for the right. Which, as always, needs all the help it can get.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 06/30/2010

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