NARAL and Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI)

I was going to post something very much like this, but David Sirota beat me to it. I agree wholeheartedly.

There is a debate raging among some bloggers about whether NARAL - the abortion rights group - was out of line in endorsing Republican Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) in his re-election bid. My take is pretty simple: if folks have a problem with NARAL endorsing Chafee because of Chafee's record on abortion, or because Chafee's challengers have far better records on abortion, that's perfectly fine. However, if they have a problem with NARAL endorsing Chafee simply because he is a Republican, that is not fine - it means folks still just don't understand how important an ideological (as opposed to partisan) infrastructure really is.

NARAL is a group whose mission is to support candidates who agree with their abortion rights positions. You can have all the debates you want about whether that's a good thing or whether its politically palatable - but they are NOT an arm of any party. In fact, if they behave as a partisan arm, they actually do damage to their credibility, and thus their effectiveness. And, most importantly, that goes for all issue/labor/progressive ideological groups. Why?

Simple - because if an issue/labor/progressive-ideology group reflexively and exclusively backs only one party all the time, they are taken for granted and thus lose their power to move the agenda. Consider, for instance, Democrats, labor and trade.

There is a credible argument to be made that more and more Democrats have been permitted to stiff American workers by supporting corporate-written trade deals because labor hasn't been willing to punish them (the SEIU/AFL-CIO fight - however it shakes out - may mean that's changing). There is an argument to be made that if more Democrats felt some sort of pain for screwing over the labor movement, they wouldn't screw over the labor movement as much as some of them do.