Today, the Susan B. Anthony List celebrated the election of the eighth pro-life woman U.S. Representative in the 112th Congress and a major upset in Ann Marie Buerkle’s defeat of pro-abortion incumbent Dan Maffei.
“Ann Marie Buerkle’s win is historic for women, the unborn and New York’s 25th Congressional District,” SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said. “A pro-life gain in this district – thought by many to be out of reach – affirms the wave of pro-life feminine leadership pouring into the 112th Congress. That wave, including Buerkle’s election, further confirms that 2010 is the Year of the Pro-Life Woman.
“As the first woman elected to Congress from NY-25, she brings years of experience speaking out for Life and feminine leadership harkening back to its roots in authentic pro-life feminism. At the same time, she replaces a consistently pro-abortion vote with dependable advocacy for Life on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
As a registered nurse and mother of six, Buerkle will contribute a unique medical background and a strong commitment to ending taxpayer funding of abortion to Congress.
In the weeks leading up to the November general election, the SBA List mailed nearly 23,000 households in NY-25 and bundled nearly $24,000 for the Buerkle campaign. The SBA List spent $2.3 million electing pro-life women to congressional and statewide office, resulting in a 70 percent increase in the number of pro-life women in the U.S. House of Representatives, an increase in the number of pro-life women governors from one to four and the election of the 112th Congress’ first pro-life woman Senator. SBA List-endorsed candidates won 83 percent of the time in SBA List-versus-EMILY’s List head-to-head races.
. . . think about Ann Marie Buerkle’s victory in NY-25. She is now six weeks away from being a member of Congress, but what about six weeks ago?
It was Sunday, Oct. 17, and Pete Da Tech Guy and I were driving on our way to cover the Buerkle campaign, when I got a call from the Lonely Conservative. The headline in that morning’s Syracuse Post-Standard was devastating:
The poll showed Maffei with a 51-39 lead. If this poll was accurate, Buerkle was doomed. When we stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s in Hancock, N.Y., I put up a quick blog post scoffing at the poll, but honestly? I was heartsick.
You can’t put too much stock in polls. “Polls Are Not Campaigns,” as I’ve said, but I feared that this poll, which was a big front-page headline in the Syracuse paper, would have such a demoralizing effect on Buerkle’s supporters that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Buerkle campaign had been kind of a late addition to my campaign radar — I didn’t blog about her until Oct. 12 — and at that time, I had no idea what an onslaught of attack ads she was facing. Maffei had a 5-to-1 money advantage, and he was piling on more than $200,000 a week in TV ads accusing Buerkle of everything you could imagine.
Pete and I attended a Buerkle event in Clyde, N.Y., and there were maybe 50 people there. Maybe. Here it was, two weeks before the election, and the Republican candidate was still speaking to small groups, while Maffei had 1,000 at his rally with Bill Clinton.
This was not encouraging.
The next day, we covered a press conference near Syracuse where Buerkle pushed back against a Maffei attack ad that accused her of failing to pay her taxes. Maybe there were 50 supporters there. Maybe. And just the fact that she was having to do a press conference to answer an attack ad . . .
Look: You answer a TV ad with a TV ad. That’s just Campaign 101. Buerkle was doing a press conference, counting on the media to convey her response to this ad, which indicated that she couldn’t afford to run TV ads answering Maffei’s attacks.
This was not encouraging.
So when Pete and I left NY-25, I was seriously worried about Buerkle’s prospects. She was fighting hard, but unless something happened to change the dynamic of the race, it didn’t look like she could pull it off.
Anyway, Election Night found me in Boca Raton, Fla., amid the happy chaos of Allen West’s victory party in FL-22. It was difficult to keep track of results elsewhere, but somewhere during that madness I saw (perhaps at the Lonely Conservative) that Maffei was ahead by 3,000 votes.
Oh, well, nice try. Close, but no cigar. You win some, you lose some.
And then, the next afternoon, Left Coast Rebel posted the news that, due to late returns from Wayne County, Buerkle was now leading by more than 600 votes!
What happened? How had this campaign — outspent 5-to-1 by the incumbent and trailing in the polls — managed to pull off such an upset?
Remember the old saying, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”?
About five days before the election — while I was on my way to VA-9 to cover Morgan Griffith — the Maffei campaign played the “extremist” card with this ad:
OK, game over, right? She’s a kooky “anti-choice” extremist wingnut. Somebody like that can’t possibly get elected in this supposedly moderate district, right? But the Lonely Conservative didn’t see it that way:
NY25 covers all of Onondaga and Wayne Counties, and part of Cayuga and Monroe Counties. But a large portion of NY25?s voters are in Onondaga County. I did some digging and found out that there were 147,332 Catholics in Onondaga County alone in 2000. . . . I’m sure enough of those Catholics are registered voters who could swing the election in Buerkle’s favor. This race hasn’t been about social issues. It’s been about the economy, the direction of our country, and the failed policies of the current administration and Congress. By running this ad Dan Maffei just gave undecided pro-life voters a reason to vote for Ann Marie Buerkle.
See? Buerkle needed a miracle to win and, by highlighting her pro-life record in the final days of the campaign, her opponent gave her that miracle. Out of more than 200,000 votes cast in NY-25, Buerkle won by 657 votes, and how many of those votes were decided on the pro-life issue?
Da Tech Guy says “nobody outside of me, Stacy and the Lonely Conservative thought [Buerkle] was a winner,” but I had given her up for lost on Election Night.
You see that she and her supporters had every reason to become discouraged and quit. But they kept hoping and fighting and, thanks to an unexpected miracle, they won.
So hang in there. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
My opponent, Sean Bielat, supports the reversal of Roe v. Wade. When asked by a reporter whether he would allow abortion in the case of rape or incest, he refused to answer. On a questionnaire by the Massachusetts Citizens for Life, he agreed with every position taken by that organization.
In other words, Barney believes that Bielat’s unapologetic pro-life stance is a political liability. OK, so let me ask this question: How many faithful Catholics in the 4th District?
How many of those Catholics have voted for Barney Frank in the past? How many Catholic voters in the 4th District know that Sean Bielat is Catholic, and that Barney Frank is sending out fundraising letters attacking Bielat for supporting the Catholic pro-life position?
Look, I remember the Scott Brown campaign. I remember how Martha Coakley lashed herself to the mast on the pro-abortion position. And I remember talking to Catholic Democrats — including elected Democratic public officials — who told me they were voting for Scott Brown.
Some Republicans want to pretend that pro-life voters don’t matter, but in a place like Massachusetts, the Democrat who alienates Catholics on the abortion issue is taking a huge risk if he ever finds himself facing a strong Republican challenger with the courage to stand up and say, “I believe in the right to life.”
But the thing is they don’t like children to begin with. They think children are the problem. They push for people not to have children. They push to kill preborn children.
Conservative Party chairman Mike Long said all along that Hoffman would once again be their party’s candidate in NY-23. Long warned that Doheny was unacceptable for the Conservative endorsement. The chairman explained that, after the Republican establishment picked RINO Dede Scozzafava in 2009, the Conservatives had asked Doheny to run on their ticket, but he turned them down: “Matt Doheny failed at that defining moment.”
Chairman Long also noted that on Oct. 10, 2009 — after conservatives nationwide began rallying behind Hoffman — Doheny made the maximum $2,400 contribution to Scozzafava:
Doheny did more than max out to “Dede for Congress Inc.” On Oct. 29, after Hoffman had gotten the endorsements of Sarah Palin, Dick Armey and other national conservative leaders, Doheny donated $10,000 to the only major group still actively supporting Scozzafava, the New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee.
Thus, Doheny gave $12,400 to beat Doug Hoffman in 2009 — which is $10,900 more than the total of all Doheny’s other contributions to Republicans ($1,500), as listed on the FEC Web site.
Many Republicans will argue that conservatives should ignore Doheny’s RINO record and support him anyway. They’ll make the same argument they made when they argued that conservatives should support Mike Castle: “But he can win!”
Let ’em argue until they’re blue in the face. They’re wrong.
No pro-life group in the country would dare endorse Doheny. According to 2008 exit polls, 12% of New York voters are Catholics who attend Mass weekly. If even half of those faithful Catholic voters share Hoffman’s view — “I’m pro-life. Period.” — he’ll get more than enough votes to prevent the election of a pro-abortion Republican like Doheney.
Doug Hoffman had the guts to take on a tough fight. Doheny didn’t.
Levin is rapidly becoming talk radio’s most Web 2.0-savvy host. He’s got nearly 40,000 Twitter followers and more than 200,000 fans on Facebook. And he’s not only reading blogs, he’s arguing with bloggers:
Allahpundit over at Hotair, linking to like-minded bloggers here and there, argues, among other things, that he thought Beck was wrong when Beck said he’d rather have seen Obama as president than McCain. This is off the mark. I criticized Beck for the same thing. But comparing a conservative challenge to a liberal in a Republican primary to Obama v. McCain in a general election is incoherent. . . .
Read the whole thing. The subject is the Delaware GOP Senate primary, where Levin is Christine O’Donnell’s most influential supporter. Here’s his June 24 interview with Christine:
O’Donnell points out that she could beat Mike Castle in the Delaware with as few as 20,000 votes. Let’s parse those numbers just a bit. According to a CNN exit poll, 27% of Delaware voters in 2008 were Catholic, and 39% of those voted for John McCain. So roughly 11% of the Delaware electorate are Republican Catholics — probably solid pro-lifers — and in 2008, the turnout in Delaware was 408,000 voters.
So let’s say there are 40,000 pro-life Catholic voters in Delaware, and there have got to be at least 10,000 pro-life evangelical Protestants. If there are 50,000 pro-life voters in Delaware, that’s almost exactly the total turnout (50,237) in the 2008 Delaware GOP primary. But this is an off-year election and, in 2006, the total vote in the Republican primary was 14,386.
Do Delaware’s pro-life they know that Mike Castle gets only a 10% score from the National Right to Life Committee? Do these pro-life voters know that Mike Castle was one of only 11 Republicans who voted against a law that would have made it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines for abortion without parental notification? Have they seen the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List’s endorsement of O’Donnell, when SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser said:
“Unlike her primary opponent, who has an explicitly pro-abortion voting record, O’Donnell has expressed her strong determination to be a vocal advocate for women and unborn children in abortion debates on the floor of the U.S. Senate . . . A new women’s movement which affirms its original pro-life roots is making its way to the U.S. Senate and O’Donnell is one of its brightest new stars.”
Forget about everything else: This is about life vs. death, Christine O’Donnell is pro-life, and I know what pro-lifers are like. They vote. They will crawl through broken glass and scale a 10-foot fence with three strands of concertina wire on top just to get to the polls on Election Day, if you show them a candidate who will stand up for the right to life. We know who that candidate is, don’t we?
Isn’t that kind of creepy? Basically, you’re saying that the abortion of your own grandchild is such a grand idea as to assume paramount importance in your political worldview.
Yeah, I know: She’s talking about the “right to choose,” but the abstract right to abortion can’t be separated from the concrete reality of abortion, and that reality is a gruesome, blood-chilling thing to consider. Philosophical theorizing about “rights” can’t elude that reality. And neither can bear costumes.
Americans United for Life is about to release a bombshell 54-page report on Elena Kagan’s 1996 intervention in the partial-birth abortion issue, and has scheduled a Capitol Hill press conference this afternoon:
Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, will host a press conference today with several leading Senators at 2:30pm to discuss a new report released today by Americans United for Life Action which contains new information regarding Elena Kagan’s role, during her time in the Clinton Administration, in pressuring the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to change their policy statement on partial-birth abortion. Senator Sessions will be joined by Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life Action, and leaders of other major pro-life organizations.
The report is embargoed, but it highlights serious ethical issues and may be enough to reignite the debate over Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote next week on the nomination, but that vote could well be delayed.
