Obama's common ground arguments assume that the partisans in the abortion battle want to find some sort of compromise.

The people who might be motivated to seek compromise on social issues are those who gain politically if they can shuffle those issues off the table. This includes:

a) Moderate Republican Senators and Governors with presidential aspirations. Weak credentials on the abortion issue are a serious liability in the Republican primary process. Rudy Giuliani learned this last year, and John McCain's consideration of pro-choice Tom Ridge as a running mate caused a near-riot among the conservative base.

b) Mainline Democrats recognize that there are a lot of social conservatives who are struggling with mortgages, unemployment and health care costs, and could be swayed by Democratic messages and Democratic candidates, if they weren't completely opposed to voting for any candidate taking the wrong view on abortion.

c) Barack Obama. He's got judges he wants to get through confirmation, and he wants to increase his congressional majority in 2010 and 2012. has never won on wedge issues, and Republicans will play up social issues, particularly abortion and backlash to legalization of gay marriage, to try to drown out Obama's health care and economic messages.

However, conservatives have no reason to make any compromise. Conservative voters feel that any compromise is tantamount to complicity in child murder, and conservative politicians find that the social issues are so important to their constituents that no Democrat can ever represent a viable alternative to a pro-life Republican. In other words, even if a material concessions were on the table, the pro-life movement will walk away from a compromise situation that allows abortion to remain legal.

Similarly, the pro-choice crowd has everything they want on the issue, and gains nothing by giving anything up. Making concessions to deemphasize abortion in political discourse would be viewed by many as selling out women's rights for other agenda items. For many activists, this is untenable.

Really, really well said, and I wish to God Saletan would read it and understand that all he's accomplishing is strengthening forces which have no intention of compromising, EVER. Thanks.

Agree. This whole idea of "compromise conversation" is a fool's errand. There may be a stalemate at the moment, but unless Obama is willing to take a principled stand against the terrorism of the pro-life faction, he, and Saletan, should sit down and shut up before they cause real damage.

I just posted my own post on uncompromisable morality based politics, but that's no reason to not even have a conversation, people. Part of how we got to where we are today, in no small part actually, is because we stopped having conversations.

Crawford,

You're probably correct. But do you think a majority of Americans are so opposed to teaching about birth control and promoting the use of contraceptives? I know many religious leaders are, but I don't think they represent the majority of Americans who want to keep their daughters from getting pregnant. There seems room for compromise there.

Regardless of where "conservatives" and "the pro-choice crowd" are, most people want to see these compromises. Most US Americans don't like abortion, don't want the government to completely stop it, and want rational laws and policies that help everyone. The people who will win by having this conversation are those who actually want to be productive and have the best interests of citizens in mind. If "conservatives" and "the pro-choice crowd" continue to pretend that the argument is that polarized, they'll both lose -- that's why they need to compromise.