Anti-abortion down the line.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

Back in 2000, when John McCain was running against George W. Bush, he attacked Bush in a debate for supporting the Republican Party platform's proposed Constitutional amendment to ban abortion. McCain wanted to revise the platform language to include exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at stake. Bush agreed with the general idea of those exceptions, but McCain jumped all over him. The platform, he told Bush, "doesn't have exceptions in it, and you know that very well."

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That opened the door for Alan Keyes to chastise his rivals as insufficiently anti-abortion. McCain, he said, had told people he would leave the decision up to his own daughter. McCain shot back, evoking his war record: "I've seen enough killing in my life.... I will not listen to you lecture me on the sanctity of life ... and do not bring, please, my daughter into it. This is a family decision."

Exchanges like these have left the public with the impression that McCain is a moderate on abortion. But his record shows just the opposite: Out of 119 votes in the Senate, he has voted anti-choice 115 times.

Recently, Sam Brownback, the staunchly anti-abortion Republican Senator from Kansas who joined McCain's campaign after quitting his run run for President, told ABC that McCain, as the Republican nominee, won't change the platform, either. "I think you're going to see a platform process that's going to maintain that plank," Brownback says.

"Anyone who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade and votes against birth control can hardly be called a moderate," says Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL. "The record is very clear."

Yet McCain has managed to give voters the impression that he is not ardently anti-choice. In Florida's Republican primary, for example, he won 45 percent of voters who said in exit polls that abortion should be legal--more than twice as many as his pro-choice rival Rudy Giuliani.

"He plays both sides of it," Keenan says. "The day of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries he was giving what we call 'the code speech' on strict constructionist judges--that's code for being against abortion rights. Then the next day he flew to Oregon and talked about global warming. The public puts people into boxes."

People see McCain speaking out on global warming or working with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform, and they assume he's a moderate, especially on "culture war" issues.

"He's not a moderate. He's not a maverick. He's...