Continuing the conversation:

...And in the same way, we think that negative campaigning lowers the quality of civic life, but the negative ads are those we are most likely to remember...

...Arguably, Roe and subsequent decisions gravely harmed both public debate and morals by establishing an effectively unlimited right to abortion...

...What makes Cuomo's argument so crude, according to Woodward, is that "he says that his reasons for thinking abortion 'sinful' are not only 'private' but sectarian as well...

...The difficulty, of course, is that this tactic makes him look weak or evasive—an image strengthened, to the delight of Republicans, by the necessary complexities and compromises of Kerry's years in the Senate...

...His rhetoric is humorless and portentous—he always sounds to me like a slightly demented Episcopal bishop...

...I confess to being blind to the crudeness of Cuomo's argument...

...Wilson Carey McWilliams CAMPAIGN 2004 Are guile & force enough...

...After having dismissed Cuomo's 1984 speech at Notre Dame as "ancient sophistry," Woodward impugns Cuomo's argument as crude, even cruder than crude, and thus worthy only of repudiation...

...But what policy positions ought to follow from this moral position...

...Basically, I agree...

...n the presidential election of 2004, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state and future of the country—something like 70 percent of Americans have been telling pollsters that the election matters a "great deal" to them, enough for John Zogby to call it the "Armageddon election—but not many seem to be excited about the campaign...

...Two questions arise...

...They could, of course, simply have refrained from watching, but they knew, at least half-consciously—and more important, the networks knew, altogether consciously—that as private individuals we could not resist following the case in all its luxurious tawdriness...

...Cuomo does imply in his Notre Dame speech that the problem with making the Catholic position on abortion the law of the land is that it is based on what he calls "religious values" not shared by "the pluralistic community at large...

...And while the debates might change voters' impressions of the candidates—I write this a week before the first scheduled debate—the Democrats recognize that as a TV debater, John Kerry is more likely to resemble Al Gore than John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan...

...BISHOPS & ABORTION Bernard G. Prusak "For the pope, the bishops...and most practicing Catholics," Newsweek' s Kenneth L. Woodward wrote recently in the New York Times, "abortion is the taking of innocent human life and therefore violates the most fundamental of human rights" ("A Political Sacrament," May 28...

...As Catholics, must we oppose a right to abortion...

...The president is leading the political dance, defining the terms of the contest, and Kerry hasn't shown any promise of changing that...

...Partly, this reflects Kerry's electoral experience in Massachusetts, a state in which a Democrat who survives the primary is reasonably sure of election if he or she doesn't mortally offend some element of the party's (admittedly fractious) coalition...

...Second, how to stand toward Roe v. Wade...

...The contest is strangely flat, often strident but scripted and predictable, an unfunny sitcom doomed to early extinction...

...After all, there are arguments against abortion that do not turn on the status of the fetus, thoughthis fact may sometimes come as a surprise in Catholic circles...

...They've settled, for the most part, into a "horse race" coverage that features polls and sound bites, amplified chiefly by whatever scandal happens along...

...If I recognize some arguments as credible, yet not convincing to me—say, arguments for a right to abortion at very early stages of development, or when the fetus is severely deformed—then I have some thinking to do...

...By way of example, he reports that in a telephone conversation he "reminded Cuomo that a human embryo can never turn out to be a cat or dog"—an "argument" that does seem to me to be crude, and that Cuomo rightly criticizes as exhibiting a "cavalier disdain for the need to explain or justify the Catholic position...

...The voters for whom Kerry and Bush are competing are more likely to watch network news, and at this point in the campaign, the networks are almost impervious to issues and argument...

...There is, it should be noted, another sort of moderation: one that takes some relatively strong positions from the Right and some from the Left, the sort of roughly balanced daring that seems to come naturally to Senator John McCain or, in a softer mode, to Bill Clinton...

...Moreover, apart from a few moments like Barack Obama's soaring keynote, the convention's positive theme was a one-note emphasis on Kerry's service in Vietnam, at least a little tiresome and sometimes really tacky, like Kerry's "reporting for duty" salute at the beginning of his acceptance speech...

...Bernard G. Prusak teaches humanities and political theory at Boston University...

...The other part seems to be that the obligation to serve "the whole pluralistic community" prudently and with due respect to fundamental differences overrides his own "religious values...

...A similar document on abortion—meaning, say, two hundred tightly argued pages—would benefit both the faithful and our national political culture...

...Maybe so...

...For example, it was sensible to accentuate the positive at the Democratic convention, but Kerry's staff—assembled higgledy-piggledy and including some political operatives who are the next thing to standing jokes—fell foolishly in love with the idea...

...Obviously, Kerry's campaign gets a low score for tactics...

...Is a person with my convictions bound, if he is to be consistent with himself, to oppose a right to abortion...

...Woodward writes that the Catholic argument against abortion is "broader" than one proposed from a purely religious perspective, "advancing philosophical, political, and even biological warrants...

...Is the answer self-evident...

...A majority of voters don't much like either candidate, but about two-thirds of them are now persuaded that George W. Bush will win, and the Democrats are where they were a year ago, convinced that Bush could lose the election through bad news or some major gaffe, but hard pressed to see how John Kerry can win it...

...Yet it is true that the U.S...

...First, is it true that the Catholic position on abortion is sectarian...

...It is not a merely academic question in this election year, when there is a Catholic prochoice candidate for the presidency...

...In other words, should whether abortion is legal or not be for voters to decide...

...The bishops may take the work of the President's Council on Bioethics as a model...

...The answer seems to depend upon, first, whether there are credible moral arguments supporting a right to abortion in limited circumstances and, second, whether and to what extent such different positions deserve respect...

...He has no signature issue and no clearly defined agenda: rule out distaste for Bush, and it's very hard to complete the sentence, "I am for John Kerry because...

...Yet it is true that Cuomo's own argument is open to challenge, and in two respects...

...And now Woodward and Mario M. Cuomo have brought this dispute—or returned it, more accurately—to the pages of Commonweal (September 24...

...In his Notre Dame speech, Cuomo called for a "dialogue in the Catholic community" on "[t]he problems created by the matter of abortion" and claimed, quoting Bishop Joseph Sullivan, that the church had failed "to teach our own people" adequately about these problems...

...In reaching for support among the relatively small number of undecided voters in the center, Kerry's version of moderation is trimming, splitting the difference, fuzzing the edges of policy so as not to offend...

...Cuomo apparently takes the view that an elected official is obliged to support his or her positions in terms of what the late political philosopher John Rawls called "public reason": in terms that all constituents can be expected to recognize as reasonable, even if they may disagree...

...First, which trumps which: the right of the unborn to life, or the claim of my fellow citizen to be free to act according to her moral convictions...

...In recent days, Kerry has been doing better, giving speeches that have focus and bite, but this improvement may be too little and too late...

...What is unmistakable, however, is that as a candidate, Kerry's hallmark is caution...

...Such a document would be challenging to its readers, but then, the "problems created by the matter of abortion" are challenging in themselves...

...The great majority of voters have already made up their minds, especially the public-affairs junkies who listen attentively to PBS, NPR, or the cable news channels...

...Their report, Human Cloning and Human Dignity, meticulously presents arguments both for cloning for biomedical research and against it before making a policy recommendation...

...In the first place, while voters will tell you that they dislike negative campaigns, they're speaking in their role as good citizens, thinking about what's good for the country, just as they were in 1998 when substantial majorities consistently said that they wished the media would spend less time on 1'affaire Lewinsky...

...As Paul Weithman has noted in these pages ("Let Them Speak," July 16), there are several different views of the duties of public officials in a representative democracy...

...But if—and only if—there are credible moral arguments supporting a right to abortion in limited circumstances, Catholics and others opposing abortion need to wrestle with the question of whether there ought to be a correspondingly restricted right to choice...

...But both of these conclusions are controversial...

...Second, whether the Catholic position is sectarian or not, what is the justification for the claim that the obligation to serve the "whole pluralistic community" overrides one's "religious values...

...As Weithman writes, some Catholic politicians "have concluded that not all of their constituents can recognize the reasonableness of Catholic teaching on abortion, and that to en-force the Catholic view would be inconsistent with the du-ties of their public office...

...A dramatic initiative—Kennedy's call to Mrs...

...King comes to mind—might claim media attention and shake prevailing images, but so far that hasn't been Kerry's style...

...In his campaign mode—his I Commonweal I 0 October 8, 2004...

...bishops as a body, with the teaching authority that they enjoy, have not produced a document of comparable value...

...So a proposal following in Cuomo's path: If the bishops on Washington's Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's task force on "Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians" want to con-tribute to the public debate, they could produce a document fully and fairly presenting and evaluating the arguments for fh g the cRfnversat Commonweal 9 October 8, 2004 a right to abortion and against it, taking account of facts on the ground like Roe and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, and grappling with what Rawls called "the fact of reasonable pluralism...

...As a campaigner, he is anything but a star turn...

...But is the antidote to support candidates who will appoint judges dedicated to overturning Roe and doing away with a right to abortion altogether...

...In his Commonweal reply to Woodward, Cuomo makes this claim somewhat more directly: "surely a willingness to believe what I myself cannot prove" and what many people consider "at best an article of faith"—namely, "the proposition that human life begins at conception"—"is no basis on which to build a consensus of Americans...in favor of a ban on all abortions...

...If this "proposition" or "article of faith" underlies the Catholic position on abortion, then part of Cuomo's argument against making the Catholic position the law of the land is indeed that the Catholic position is "sectarian...

...To be sure, many Catholic academics and public intellectuals, both lay and religious, have written with great sophistication about abortion as a moral and political problem...

...Partly, it reflects the Nader factor in this election: competing for voters in the center, Kerry has to avoid estranging voters on the left...

...Kerry's program, as presented to the public, was what it has remained: largely vague, carefully hedged, and only uncertainly coherent...