A pro-choice GOP frontrunner?
I don't normally go for gotchas based on political candidates' rambling improvisations. But this one is hard to ignore: when Herman Cain appeared on Piers Morgan this week, he first told Morgan that he's opposed to abortion in all circumstances. But when Morgan pushed him on this, Cain pivoted to a civil libertarian argument that the government shouldn't make such decisions--instead, "that family or that mother" should.
Dan Amira puts it well:
It's perfectly reasonable for someone to be personally opposed to abortion and yet, at the same time, believe that government should not restrict everyone else from making that decision for themselves. There's nothing contradictory about that at all. It's just that, in the abortion debate, those people are known as pro-choice. Cain talks about abortion like someone who is pro-choice, yet insists that he's pro-life.
Paul Waldman predicts that Cain will walk this back in the very near future. It's hard to imagine him getting within miles of the nomination if he doesn't. Of course, it's hard to imagine that anyway--have you seen this graphic of the effects of Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan?--so who knows, maybe he'll stick to his guns while he enjoys his 15 minutes of frontrunner fame.
