Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made headlines this week when she lambasted her fellow Democrats for failing to take seriously Republicans’ pledges to overturn Roe v. Wade. In Clinton’s telling, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn abortion rights is the direct result of powerful Democrats failing to hear the anti-abortion freight train barreling toward them.
Interestingly, the former presidential hopeful doesn’t include herself in the list of high-powered national Democrats who underestimated how committed Republicans truly were to winding the clock back half a century on women’s rights. That’s a convenient bit of political amnesia, and one that allows Clinton and the centrist establishment she represents to shift blame for their disastrous missteps onto others.
Clinton’s narrative lays the blame for America’s current abortion rights nightmare at the feet of everyone from Donald Trump to her fellow Democratic lawmakers to an electorate she claims didn’t take her warnings seriously in 2016. Far from being a boost to her party’s defense of reproductive rights, Clinton’s comments are a reminder that centrist, corporate Democrats are just as myopic as ever.
Clinton is a more complicated abortion rights messenger than her branding team would have the public believe. While it’s unfair and lazy to blame Clinton for former President Bill Clinton’s willingness to treat abortion rights as a political chess piece, she also brings plenty of her own concerning media moments to the table. In fact, it was the first lady herself who popularized the now-toxic tagline that abortions should be “safe, legal and rare.”
Even years after the country had begun its shift toward supporting more pro-choice policies, Clinton stood out as a voice for moderation. Her centrist sales pitch drew icy silence from abortion rights activists during one 2005 speech in which she pleaded with the audience to find common ground with anti-abortion extremists on the right.
Clinton’s speech overflowed with “warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of ‘religious and moral values’ on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.” Later, she stunned her audience by declaring that the “jury is still out on the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs.” Far from ringing alarm bells about the GOP’s war on abortion rights, Clinton opted to chide activists for not refusing to validate conservatives’ grievances.
For years centrist Democrats shared Clinton’s conciliatory view, and so the party raced to the right in an effort to find “common ground” with anti-abortion Republicans. Clinton’s view became the consensus view, a tangle of establishment groupthink that ensnared even such well-regarded supporters of abortion rights as Barack Obama.
It took Capitol Hill’s old-guard Democrats all of four months to turn Obama from a candidate who pledged to sign the Freedom of Choice Act into law into a president who casually shrugged off abortion rights as “not the highest legislative priority.” Instead of acting to protect abortion rights, Obama pivoted to the Clintonian center — and put womens’ rights on a collision course with a rapidly radicalizing GOP. But Republicans were never interested in seeking out “common ground” with Democrats — they wanted all the ground. And in June 2022, backed by a Republican Supreme Court supermajority, they took it.
Public support for abortion rights has surged to record highs in the two years since the Dobbs decision, and the Democratic Party’s centrists are eager to reframe themselves as long-time allies in the fight. None of the party’s establishment barnacles are in a position to lecture anyone else on failures of leadership, especially after decades spent telling abortion rights activists to make nice with the same fundamentalists who are now classifying abortion pills as controlled substances and arresting women who have miscarriages.
Despite what the party’s establishment leaders might want us to believe, Democrats don’t need their help formulating a winning abortion message — the grassroots has been doing that successfully now for two years, racking up a string of landmark electoral victories along the way. Now at risk of being rendered politically obsolete, Democratic centrists are finally ready to embrace abortion, even if that means rewriting their own tortured political histories.
For progressive Democrats and abortion activists who have spent decades pushing the establishment center to action, Clinton’s remarks should be viewed as a victory. But that isn’t the same as handing over the keys. If the spurned centrists of yesteryear want to re-engage with America’s abortion debate, they’ll need to stop lecturing and start listening.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.