Hillary, Be a Leader

‘We can barely agree on a Mother’s Day resolution.”

Dana Perino, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and is now co-host of the Fox News Channel’s The Five, makes a plea for civility in her book And the Good News Is . . .

She’s worried that “we’ve gone from being the confident leader of the free world to bickering about every living thing under the sun.”

Perino is not against arguing, mind you: “I don’t confuse civility with timidity or passivity.” And, she writes: “Just as civility doesn’t mean shrinking from an argument, it also doesn’t have to mean, ‘You must agree with me.’ To the contrary, being civil means that we can argue vehemently and then either find some compromise, call it a tie, or move on to something else.”

“For a long time,” she continues, “both sides have felt berated into agreeing with the other side — whether it be the Iraq War or Obamacare. If you disagreed, you were demonized. That’s unfair and misses the benefits of having a variety of opinions.”

“If you don’t start off thinking the opposition is evil,” she advises, “but that they want to get to the same place you do, then you’re already on your way to having a more civil and productive conversation.”

Now, those might not be the magic words the manager of a presidential primary campaign wants to hear, but Perino’s ideas might just be the road to leadership. And people just might be taking some baby steps down this road right now.

#related#The last presidential campaign cycle felt like a disaster for those who argued for religious liberty. Rational arguments speaking to the need to be good stewards of our rich history of protecting conscience rights were drowned out by a campaign to label any such arguments as covert attempts to wage a “war on women.”

Some Republicans look to be insistent that such a mischaracterization won’t fly this time around.

In a recent phone conversation, former Florida governor Jeb Bush told me of his desire “to figure out a way that gets beyond being pushed into a position where you sound like you’re intolerant of people who may not agree.” Though, obviously, he points out, you want to do so while making clear “what you believe as well.” He’s optimistic on some fronts involving protecting innocent human life, listing questions where he sees more agreement than division: “Do you think a 13-year-old should have an abortion without a parent’s consent, or a parent’s at least being notified?” “Do you think there should be much more resources for adoption?” “Should there be counseling for women who are in the precarious position of having to make a decision like [abortion] that is life-changing?” On “all these things,” Bush says, “there is more consensus than where the political world says. The challenge is how do you get to that — we have to get to that.”

In recent weeks, Rand Paul flipped, as it has been said, the traditional kinds of questions Republicans get about abortion exceptions into a question for Democrats about late-term abortion. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it okay to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” He went on to encourage reporters to ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz “if she’s okay with killing a seven-pound baby that’s just not born yet . . . ” and to ask her “when life begins” and “when she’s willing to protect life.” He added: “When you get an answer from Debbie, come back to me.”

His point was in no small part to expose the party’s extremism on the issue. And, so far, Wasserman Schultz has stuck with standard talking points. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is saying that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed” to accommodate abortion.

But Democrats should welcome a way out of our miserable abortion politics. That is, if they want to make some headway on the issue and want to put teeth into the “safe, legal, and rare” rhetoric of Bill Clinton, which we haven’t heard in a long time. Specifically, in the case of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, she should take her own words into account. In her 2003 book, Living History, she writes about meeting Mother Teresa in 1994 at the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. Mother Teresa delivered a “speech against abortion, and she wanted to talk to me.”

Clinton writes: “While we never agreed about abortion and birth control, Mother Teresa and I found much common ground in many other areas, including the importance of adoption. We shared the conviction adoption was a vastly better choice than abortion for unplanned or unwanted babies.”

Now that is certainly a place to start: education and support for adoption; a working together for the good of women and children and families. And instead of being stubbornly and gravely defensive, Democrats might want to consider taking Rand Paul’s cue during this campaign cycle, rather than doubling down on the kind of politics that just keeps voters frustrated with politics. Uniting, not dividing. is good politics and good leadership. Since 2009, Gallup has seen more Americans identify themselves as pro-life than pro-choice. In a 2015 Marist poll, 84 percent of respondents want restrictions on abortion — including 70 percent of those who identify themselves as pro-choice.

“We don’t need to move the two polarized halves of the American population toward a compromise position on abortion,” Carl Anderson wrote in Beyond a House Divided. “We need to start our conversation in the place where the overwhelming majority of Americans already stand.”

“Science has changed a lot of minds about late-term abortion,” Perino recently said. “And faith and morals have changed a lot of hearts.” Who is going to be honest and throw out the battering ram? Who is going to speak for the innocent and move us forward, more hospitable to life? This should be a bipartisan, civil effort, for the sake of our very civilization. This is a “character” issue, Perino adds.

Would Hillary Clinton ever lead with a resolution honoring Mother Teresa right off the pages of her own book? Or, if she could turn back time, would she have told Mother Teresa at that prayer breakfast that she should change her views? On Friday night, I was with the Sisters of Life, a growing order of women religious established in New York to counter a culture of death. Would Clinton tell them their vocations could not be tolerated in the United States if she were president?

Hillary Clinton, it’s not too late to reread your own book and show some leadership. Help us make progress.

Hillary, Be a Leader

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