Bad Move

So, as you may or may not have heard already, NARAL came out yesterday in support of Obama.

And, um, bad job, folks. The fact that I'm not supporting Obama aside, this was a really, terribly, horribly bad move for several reasons:

1. The Democrats are going to have a candidate in three weeks. Why couldn't NARAL have waited three weeks? If they had done so, no one (or at least, far fewer people) would be accusing them of dividing the party and playing favorites. Instead, NARAL would appear to be doing exactly the right thing: throwing their support behind the winner.

2. The Obama/Clinton topic is highly controversial. By not waiting the extra three weeks, all NARAL has done is sow dissent. If you check out the comments over there, you'll see a lot of very angry, very disillusioned, and very hurt people. There's a lot of frustration and name-calling going on, on both sides. Way to unify the party, NARAL.

3. NARAL runs on donations. At least, I assume so, because they always seem to be begging me for money. As a group that runs on donations, this endorsement causes two problems. First, you have people saying, "wait... I give you my hard-earned money, and you can't even check with your base before making an announcement like this?" Then, you have these people thinking, "So, since we live in a capitalist country, and I don't like what you're doing with my money, I guess I'm going to not give you any more money."



In one fell swoop, NARAL has managed to divide the party better than any Republican ever could, anger thousands of people, and lose a lot of funding. And they should have seen it coming.

So if I, with my two semesters as a Government major (before I saw the light) under my belt, could have anticipated these issues, why didn't the people at NARAL do so? There are, realistically, only two explanations. Either NARAL saw this coming and didn't care, or they were too shortsighted to extrapolate the consequences of not waiting three weeks.

Either they're vicious or they're stupid, and either way they're not getting any more of my money.