Abortion rights will be at the forefront if Democrat Langevin decides to challenge Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 20, 2005

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- When Rep. James R. Langevin showed his political muscle at a $100,000 fundraiser here last month, his establishment boosters touted the Democrat as a great bet to seize a Senate seat next year -- and help the party mend its image on the painful topic of abortion.

Democrats will keep losing middle-of-the-road voters, declared Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, so long as their party signals that "people who have a problem with 'partial-birth abortion' are somehow not fit to serve as Democrats." The election of abortion-foe Langevin to the Senate would be "a statement of the respect that we have for all the people's views," said Lynch, an anti-abortion Democrat from South Boston.

Is this the kind of cold-eyed pragmatism that will restore the Democratic Party to majority power in the Senate -- and to the good graces of the moderate voters who usually decide presidential elections?

Not if Kate Michelman has anything to say about it.

A heroine of the abortion-rights camp, Michelman will headline another show of force in Washington this week: a fundraiser to support Secretary of State Matt Brown's Senate candidacy -- and perhaps help to keep Langevin out of the race.

"Political compromise is not the prescription for defending the party's values," Michelman declared, as she condemned the support that prominent Democrats in Rhode Island and Washington have thrown behind Langevin's prospective Senate run.

Langevin has yet to decide on a Senate race. He promises an announcement by April 1. But the furor over his prospective candidacy is only one illustration of the self-examination that national Democrats have undertaken as they struggle to recover from last year's election losses -- and to figure out whether the party's liberal orthodoxy on issues such as abortion is a strength or a weakness.

Some Democrats fear that the party has alienated too many heartland voters of temperate political and religious views, and that this has prevented the party from exploiting its natural edge on economic issues.

Other Democrats counter that the Democratic message is fundamentally sound; it was defense and homeland security issues that won the election for President Bush. Changing the party's position or emphasis on abortion or other core issues would be a form of pandering that might weaken a still-robust Democratic base, they argue.

Abortion is rarely the focal point of an election campaign or a session of Congress, but it has become the debating issue of the moment for Democrats who are looking to the mid-term campaigns of 2006.

Perhaps with an eye to a Democratic presidential run in 2008, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton put abortion front and center several weeks ago, by urging abortion-rights advocates in Albany to find common ground with their adversaries -- without backing off their principles. Clinton's speech was widely seen as an effort to return the party's emphasis to former President Bill Clinton's successful formula of insisting that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."

Leading Democrats succeeded more recently in clearing the primary field for Pennsylvania's Robert Casey Jr., an anti-abortion Senate challenger. To some abortion-rights Democrats, Casey has excellent credentials to upset an anti-abortion Republican, Sen. Rick Santorum. Casey's father became revered in the anti-abortion community after his party denied him a speaking role in the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Rhode Island's Senate race has parallels -- but for abortion-rights advocates, some excruciating differences. Unlike fellow Republican Santorum, Chafee is a great favorite of what Michelman calls "the choice community," those who favor women's right to choose whether to have an abortion.

And unlike the abortion-rights Democrat who had considered taking on Casey in a Pennsylvania Senate primary, Rhode Island's Matt Brown has pledged to stay in the race for the duration, whether or not Langevin takes the plunge. As if on cue, a group of Hollywood abortion-rights advocates spoke out against the Democratic establishment's support for a Langevin Senate run. The controversy appears likely to be a fundraising boon for Brown.

Michelman's stance suggests the complexities of the Rhode Island race for abortion-rights backers in the state and around the country: she is an abortion-rights loyalist first, a Democrat second.

If Langevin were to beat Brown in a Democratic Senate primary next year, Michelman would back abortion-rights adherent Chafee in the general election and urge her friends in the movement to do the same.

In fact, Michelman said, she might pick Chafee over Brown, even though Brown pledges to go further than Chafee in the defense of legal abortion.

LIKE THE VOTERS they represent, politicians tend to align themselves with either the abortion-rights or the anti-abortion camp, but quietly accept compromises that please purists on neither side of the issue. Voter surveys over the years have shown that a majority of Americans support legal abortion, but also support certain restrictions such as parental-consent laws.

Langevin's "pro-life" and Chafee's "pro-choice" identifications both have subtle shadings that make their positions less stark than they appear on the surface.

Langevin generally opposes abortion and supports a number of federal restrictions on access to abortion. He opposes federal subsidies for abortions, for example, and supports requirements for pregnant minors to notify and obtain the consent of parents before they can get abortions.

Langevin has also enunciated a deeply personal rationale for his anti-abortion stance. "I learned how precious life is" by surviving the accidental bullet wound that crippled him as a young man, he often has said. Langevin's story stirs the emotions of religiously motivated abortion foes. It also stirs the admiration of results-oriented politicos, who note that the usual lines of attack on abortion opponents -- extremism, intolerance, insensitivity toward women -- may not work on Langevin.

But Langevin, too, is a compromiser on abortion. When it comes to cases of rape and incest, he moves his vantage point away from that of the fetus and adopts the woman's point of view.

A girl or woman impregnated by a rapist or her father "has already been traumatized," Langevin said in a recent interview. "I would not put her through the trauma" of unwillingly continuing that pregnancy to term, he said.

But when asked how he can find a child of rape to be less worthy of protection than any other human life, Langevin ducked the question.

Abortion-rights Democrats emphasize how Langevin departs from anti-abortion orthodoxy on the key issue of federal judgeships. "I am not applying any litmus test on any issue," Langevin said. "I would base my vote on a nominee's entire record."

As a Democratic senator, in other words, Langevin would be willing to set aside his opposition to abortion and help seat a Supreme Court justice who supports Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal.

Abortion-rights adherents point to Chafee's near-perfect record, from their point of view. Chafee opposes parental-consent restrictions on abortion and the ban on late-term abortions that opponents have labeled "partial-birth" abortion. He would support, on grounds of fairness, the restoration of federal subsidies to ensure that poor women can afford abortions.

Chafee's support from the abortion-rights community takes extra force from the legacy of his late father, Sen. John H. Chafee, who used his seniority and power to resist many efforts by fellow Republicans to restrict abortion.

"I loved John Chafee," Michelman said. And she may get behind Lincoln Chafee, she said, no matter who emerges as Rhode Island's Democratic Senate nominee.

"I'd be inclined to support him, as an individual who's been supportive over the years for women's rights and reproductive rights," she said.

Michelman stressed that she no longer speaks for the organization she once led to predominance in the abortion rights movement, the National Abortion Rights Action League (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America).

But John Chafee's record on abortion included one large ambiguity that the Democrats intend to use against Lincoln Chafee, as candidate Brown and his supporters have made clear. John Chafee voted to seat Justice Clarence Thomas, who has become one of the Supreme Court's toughest and most reliable critics of Roe v. Wade.

Like Lincoln Chafee, Brown opposes parental consent, the ban on late-term abortion, and other abortion restrictions, and he supports renewed abortion subsides for poor women -- arguing, along the way, that a Democratic Senate would consider such an initiative, which Chafee's GOP collegues will never do.

Unlike Chafee, Brown also has declared himself flatly in favor of an abortion "litmus test" for all federal judges. He said he would refuse to vote for any nominee who did not first declare unequivocal support for Roe v. Wade.

Chafee has said he would generally oppose judicial nominees who do not support abortion rights. But he said it is not always possible to apply hard-and-fast litmus tests, because many judicial nominees resist being pinned down on hypothetical questions about prospective federal cases.

In Rhode Island and Washington, the argument among Democratic insiders for boosting Langevin is roughly this: Lincoln Chafee is perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Republican up for reelection next year. Jim Langevin is the Democrat best equipped to defeat Republican Chafee, because he is well-known and highly regarded by Rhode Island voters.

The Democratic insider's pitch to abortion-rights advocates is more subtle: The prospects for significant change in federal abortion policy do not reside in the legislative arena, the argument goes. Consequently, the shift of one Rhode Island senator's vote, from legal abortion adherent Chafee to abortion opponent Langevin, would not change the outcome of many votes, and thus would not significantly change the state of access to abortions in the real world.

On the judicial front, despite his opposition to abortion, Langevin could protect abortion rights in a way that Chafee never will, Langevin boosters contend. That is, Langevin could help to swing majority control of the Senate back to the Democrats, so that the power to rule the Senate's agenda and confirm or kill judicial nominations would swing back to the party that overwhelmingly favors abortion rights.

"I understand that thinking, for short-term political gain, and I understand how you can make that case," responded Michelman. "But I believe very strongly that, when you sacrifice principle and values for short-term political gain, in the end, you don't win."