Whether it’s a case of cutting their losses or eating a bunch of good, ‘ol fashioned crow, an anti-abortion group has pulled back a controversial anti-Roberts ad — a clear sign that the ad had created some backlash:
WASHINGTON — After a week of protests by conservatives, an abortion-rights group said Thursday night it is withdrawing a television advertisement linking Supreme Court nominee John Roberts to violent anti-abortion activists.
“We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts’ record,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
“Unfortunately, the debate over that advertisement has become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public,” she said in a letter Thursday to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who had urged the group to withdraw the ad.
This AP story is itself a bit misleading:
The reaction was NOT only from conservatives. There were some — including yours truly — who could not be defined as being in the Robert’s cheerleading squad who found the ad reprehensible. We wrote about it here. The ad, it turned out, was widely panned as being flatly inaccurate and downright false.
NARAL is spinning: the bottom line is that the ad created a BACKLASH and was (as we wrote in other other post) probably turning out to be a net plus for Roberts. There was nothing to “misconstrue” about that ad. It was an exaggeration that should never have been allowed to be released.
It’s hard to get this idea across in polarized 21st century America, but there were TWO paramount issues here:
- The impact of Roberts on the Supreme Court. Will he (as expected) veer it more to the right?
- What his record is.
Some folks who are worried about #1 literally threw out a bunch of #2 on #2.
The stuff simply proved to be wrong and it was NOT just conservatives who felt the ad qualified as political sleaze:
Specter, himself an abortion-rights supporter as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will question Roberts next month, earlier Thursday had called the ad “blatantly untrue and unfair.”
The NARAL ad criticizes Roberts and links him with violent anti-abortion protesters because of the anti-abortion briefs he worked on as a government lawyer.
“The NARAL advertisement is not helpful to the pro-choice cause which I support,” Specter said in a letter to Keenan.
Keenan’s response said the group will replace the ad with one that “examines Mr. Roberts’ record on several points, including his advocacy for overturning Roe v. Wade , his statement questioning the right to privacy and his arguments against using a federal civil rights law to protect women and their doctors and nurses from those who use blockades and intimidation.”
Now, that’s TOTALLY different. If the above assertion is documented, then that’s a serious point that two sides can debate. It isn’t just throwing out exaggerations that don’t stand up to fact checking.
So, again, we will note (a)One issue is the overall impact of Roberts on the court, (b)The other is his record and if his record is examined it should be honestly examined by those on the left and on the right — because some of us are truly sick of frenzied partisan politics the eschews serious consideration and opts for politics crammed with so much baloney that Subway could sell a week’s worth of sandwiches with it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.