Vice presidential candidates were asked about their views on abortion during the 1992, 1996, and 2000 debates, but PBS's Gwen Ifill broke that streak when she moderated the 2004 Cheney-Edwards debate. That year the flashpoint of the abortion debate was partial-birth abortion, an issue, needless to say, that did not help John Kerry on Election Day. Now, the Obama-Biden campaign thinks abortion can be a winning issue for them. I wonder if Ifill will bring this topic up tomorrow night.
If she does, it will be interesting to see how she frames the question. In last night's Palin interview, Katie Couric asked a question that might as well have been crafted by the Obama campaign: "If a 15 year-old is raped by her father, do you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion?" Palin replied that she respects people who disagree, wants fewer abortions in America, and would "personally ... counsel the person to choose life."
This is the second time Palin has had to answer the abortion-in-the-case-of-rape/incest question on national TV (first time was Charlie Gibson's ABC interview). If the media want to be fair, they should really start asking Obama about his vote on the born-alive bill and questions like: "Do you want tax dollars to pay for partial-birth abortions?"
The fact that Obama hasn't had to talk about these extremist positions on national TV has certainly helped him. That's why Palin needs to pivot and turn her response to any question about abortion into an attack on Obama, as she did in her interview last night with Hugh Hewitt--hitting Obama on his partial-birth abortion and born-alive votes.
It would be helpful if Palin points out tomorrow that Obama favors spending millions of tax dollars on abortions--a fact that completely undercuts his pledge to reduce the number of abortions in America. As Joe Biden said on Meet the Press last year:
I still am opposed to public funding for abortion. It goes to the question of whether or not you're going to impose a view to support something that is not a guaranteed right but an affirmative action to promote.
Palin could draw some blood by throwing that quote in Biden's face. Then again, maybe she should just cede her time to Biden and hope he'll digress into a self-destructing discussion of the "animated fetus doctrine".
