Many Democrats fear that the election of John McCain would signal the end of abortion rights in the United States, but the real bosses of the GOP know that it would be suicidal for Republicans to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's the only issue that gives the rest of their agenda moral cover, at least for orthodox Catholics and Bible-belt born-agains.

No matter what crimes Republicans commit, Democratic "baby-killers" can never attain the shadow of a shadow of moral superiority in the minds of tens of millions of right-wing Christians.

The Republicans torture prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but...

Democrats kill the unborn.

The Republicans lied us into a war in Iraq, but...

Democrats kill the unborn, and this mantra has been electing Republicans ever since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

Without Roe v. Wade, Republicans are nothing but whores for billionaires and Big Oil, and even the far fringe of far-right Christians knows this somewhere in the back of their minds.

But as long as Roe v. Wade stands, no amount of lies or whoring will ever drive right-wing Christians out of the Republican Party, because liars and whores are just garden-variety sinners, but a baby-killer is a monster.

I don't endorse this world-view any more than the real bosses of the Republican Party believe in it, but they know that the survival of the Republic Party depends on Roe v. Wade, and they will never overturn it unless they are inescapably cornered by right-wing Christians.

Notes:

1. After I originally posted this essay on My Left Wing, the vision of Roe v. Wade being overturned suddenly became a lot more vivid.

I could be totally wrong about which game the Republicans will play with this issue, and I am not suggesting that anybody vote for McCain or refrain from voting for Obama because of a phony assurance that abortion rights would survive a McCain Presidency.

I almost deleted this thing, but decided to leave it up, because it's still worth noting that the real bosses of the GOP have been playing the religious right for suckers all along, and they probably aren't eager to give up this profitable little game.

2.  For those of you who may have forgotten, the real attitude of the GOP's ruling elite toward right-wing Christians and their anti-abortion agenda was exposed by David Kuo, formerly Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House.

3. In the background of my opinion that the GOP would be reluctant to actually abrogate Roe, there's a little political psychology that may be completely off the wall, although it seems convincing enough to me.

Someone might perfectly well object that overturning Roe v. Wade would wed the religious right to Republicans with bonds of gratitude forever, but gratitude is a very weak political force, and it seems to me that the issue of abortion would lose most of its force for the religious right if it were reduced to a mere possibility that Democrats might restore Roe, and lost its status as what many right-wing Christians see as an on-going abomination.

On the other side of the issue, I think that a Republican abrogation of Roe would energize pro-choice voters far beyond their current level of activism.

As paradoxical as it may sound, and as easy as it may be to mistake what I am about to suggest for cynical logic-chopping, I think there's a possibility that if the Republicans nullified Roe, then something like its original intensity might return to feminist politics. Susan Faludi has brilliantly analyzed what she and many others see as a loss of energy after passage of the 19th Amendment:

In the years after the ratification of suffrage, the anticipated women's voting bloc failed to emerge, progressive legislation championed by the women's movement was largely thwarted, female politicians made only minor inroads into elected office, and women's advocacy groups found themselves at loggerheads.

Anger is a more significant political force than gratitude everywhere and forever, and Republicans might eventually regret their temporary "triumph" if they repealed Roe v. Wade and simultaneously made themselves a target for a new generation of legitimately outraged women.