Your chapter on abortion, for example, has enough ideas in it to get both sides extremely pissed at you. It says a lot about the right wing that they tend to see things in those terms. I think the left would have been just as prone to see me as the enemy thirty years ago, and probably would be today if it wasn't so frantically grasping for survival. A lot of the issues in today's politics get defined by the extremes, by people who bend the truth to their biases rather than the other way around. That's probably the fault of the rest of us who absolve ourselves from taking responsibility for seizing the political debate and conducting it on more reasonable terms.
Abortion is probably the best example of that.
As I say in the book, it seems as if the debate over abortion is controlled by people who would allow any and all abortion, right up to the moment of birth, and people who would outlaw any and all abortion, virtually back to the moment of conception. Of course, it's an issue that by its nature defies knowing what the truth is, because that would entail knowing the spiritual and metaphysical certainties we can't know. But it wouldn't hurt to contemplate the uncertainties of the issue rather than scream about it. In the first half of '96, the political debate wasn't between Democrat and Republican so much as between moderate Republican and extreme right wing Republican. All Presidential campaigns have some degree of in-party conflict to them.