On Tuesday night, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington, all of the announced Democratic presidential contenders will take turns affirming their support for Roe vs. Wade -- the decision the Supreme Court handed down 30 years ago this week guaranteeing the legal right to abortion.
Get used to it: That may become a common sight.
Look down the road, around a couple of curves, and it's easy to envision a 2004 presidential race in which the Democratic nominee promotes more aggressively liberal positions on abortion and, perhaps, gun control than at any point in recent memory.
That prediction flies in the face of the recent Democratic tendency to mute both issues. Most Democrats in the past two elections have put their greatest effort into reconnecting with culturally conservative voters -- such as blue-collar men and rural families -- by shooting skeet and hanging out with NASCAR drivers.
But these efforts are running into what looks like an impenetrable wall: President Bush's enormous popularity with those same voters. And by 2004, that may force the Democrats to completely reverse course and pursue very different groups -- women, urban voters and upscale suburbanites along the two coasts and in the upper Midwest -- by stressing abortion and guns.
In 2000, a straightforward political calculus discouraged both presidential candidates from talking much about either issue.
The strategists in the Bush and Al Gore campaigns correctly concluded that the nation was so evenly divided between states with liberal and conservative majorities on the two issues that neither side could gain by stressing them.
Any votes Gore might have won in New Jersey or California by emphasizing his support for gun control and legal abortion might have cost him votes in Tennessee or West Virginia. The reverse was true for Bush. In the end, the country divided almost exactly in half, with Gore carrying almost all socially liberal "blue" states and Bush dominating in socially conservative "red" areas.
But Bush's deepening strength in the socially conservative regions of the country may be undermining that balance. In November, in red states like Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado, Bush demonstrated he could inspire Republican voters to turn out in droves. It was a vivid signal of how difficult it could be for the Democrats to seriously challenge Bush next time in all but a handful of the 30 states he carried in 2000.
