The videos feature Lorna Brett Howard, former President of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization of Women, where she also worked with Planned Parenthouse, and she is currently on the board and the political action committee of a large pro-choice organization in New York. She has personal knowledge of Obama's strong pro-choice record in Illinois, and says that later when the call went out to U.S. Senators to help fight against the South Dakota legislation to criminalize abortions, only one Senator answered the call and helped: not HC of New York, but Barack Obama.
What makes this statement powerful at this moment is that she was a Hillary supporter, who says she witnessed Hillary falsely telling women in Iowa that Obama was weak on choice as a state senator, when Howard knew for a fact he wasn't from having worked with him at the time, and then she was shown a direct mail piece from the Clinton campaign making the same charges in New Hampshire. At that point she switched her support from Hillary to Obama. "This line of attack on an issue I care about so deeply is not acceptable to me," Howard said. She ends her video statements with the words: "Barack Obama, 100% pro-choice, 100% honest."
These outright lies told by Hillary and her campaign in their direct mail literature aimed at women surfaced in a Washington Post story. The Clintons got what the Washington Post describes as "two dozen" prominent women to sign an open letter faulting Obama for being "soft on abortion rights." Now three of those same women have signed another letter proclaiming that Obama is "strongly pro choice," and one of the signers--Katie Wheeler, a former state senator--has called out the Clinton campaign for misleading her and issuing this lie:
"It should never have gotten to the point where anyone thought Obama was not pro-choice," said Wheeler, a founder of the New Hampshire chapter of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "I don't think the Clinton campaign should have done that. It was divisive and unnecessary...I think it was a mistake and I've spoken to the national [Clinton campaign] and told them it caused problems in New Hampshire, and am hoping they won't do it again."
It's possible that Hillary won New Hampshire with such last minute lies, especially considering the boost in her votes among women. It's also clear that the Clintons' strategies are dividing the Democratic party.
The conclusion that Obama is weak on choice--not something that Hillary says directly in debates--is apparently based on his votes in the Illinois legislature when he voted "present" on some bills involving women's issues. That these were tactical, and sometimes at the expressed wishes of Planned Parenthood and the National Organization of Women, has been known for months, and recent media fact checks haven't altered that conclusion. So the Clintons are knowingly using this to falsely characterize Obama as weak on the choice issue. But they don't come out and say it, because it would be very flimsy evidence even if credible.
Some people believe that the Clintons deliberately raised racial issues, calculating that there are more white voters than black in the primaries overall, and probably that black voters remember the Clinton years fondly, and anyway will have nowhere else to go in the general election but to vote for a Democrat. Others dispute this. But it seems clear, though mostly unreported, that the Clintons have aimed several of their deliberate distortions towards winning the women's vote. That's probably even a subtext of their scurrilous attack on Obama's musings in an interview about Republican ideas, thoroughly discredited now, especially as more of Clintons' own words saying pretty much the same thing surface (Bill Clinton back in 1991 for instance, when he was running for President). Columnist E. J. Dionne concludes: "And with both Clintons on record saying kind things about Reagan, why go after Obama on the point? Honestly: If Obama is a Reaganite, then I am a salamander. " But being in favor of Reaganistic ideas is in part code for being anti-choice for women, which could be the rationale for what otherwise seems irrational.
With the first woman to run for President contending with the first African American running for President, issues of race and gender--the so-called "identity politics"--were bound to be factors. But it seems clear that the Clintons are forcing these issues with their conscious distortions, and doing so dishonestly. It remains to be seen how effectively.
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