WASHINGTON -- Trent Lott says flat out that George W. Bush will pick a right-to-life politician as his running mate, probably in about a week.
Translation: The Senate's majority leader is disguising a strong recommendation as a prediction, giving more prominent voice to the views of many conservatives that abortion is the kind of issue that does not permit the ultimate form of ticket splitting.
Pat Buchanan is saying that Governor Bush doesn't have the nerve to pick a prochoice running mate, such as Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge.
Translation: The wily coyote is trying to goad Bush into picking Ridge, an act that in addition to the turmoil it would generate in the GOP world would also help give some right-to-life juice to Buchanan's Reform Party candidacy.
Pro-Ridge Republicans, meanwhile, have gone to ground in the face of the conservatives' negative onslaught. Bush himself tries to be nice to his pal in public, but even that effort is starting to appear forced, and his meeting with prochoice Governor George Pataki of New York last week had the stench of bone-tossing symbolism.
Translation: As the prochoice forces prepare themselves for another loss on the GOP platform, there is simply no sign that Bush is willing to take on the party's religious right.
The overall meaning of the latest tea leaf events is that because the countdown to the GOP convention has begun, and because the veep selection is imminent, the wrestling match with abortion rights has begun. It is one of the principal table-settings for the convention itself because both the veep and the platform will be the news events before the convention opens.
The fact remains that no prochoice Republican has come within an inch of the vice presidency in the 20 years since the bizarre events in Detroit when Ronald Reagan picked Bush's father. The elder Bush went from prochoice to right-to-life on the spot, never explained himself, and never looked back.
Aware of how much damage this position has done since 1988 to the party's relationship with many female voters, Governor Bush has spent a year trying to downplay a right-to-life orthodoxy that cannot be denied. Bush can go for weeks without mentioning abortion. He usually tries to mask his position with a detour onto his opposition to partial-birth abortion, a stance that lost its legitimacy after last month's 5-4 Supreme Court decision overturning legislative efforts to shatter certain Roe v. Wade constitutional guarantees. Because it was a one-vote margin, prochoice voters know that the fundamentals of the right to choose hang by a thread.
You can now explain it in 30 seconds, says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, who does research for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, whose president, Janet Benshoof, was the cocounsel in last month's Nebraska decision. There is now an opportunity to speak to prochoice Americans.
Between the oral arguments at the Supreme Court and the actual decision, Garin convened focus groups in two important, swing voter locales - Long Island and northern Virginia - exposing the discussants to longer newspaper articles summarizing the oral arguments.
Garin's voters, he said, all concluded they had been had by the right-to-life movement's five-year campaign and concluded to a person that the Nebraska law was wrong. Until their exposure to facts, they had to varying degrees bought into the propaganda that partial-birth abortioninvolved the killing of a baby that was almost ready to be born.
What was clear from the argument was that all nine justices saw the Nebraska statute as involving the basic meaning of Roe v. Wade itself. The voters changed markedly as they discovered that the law in fact covered more than one procedure that is used before fetuses are viable, that the political phrase had no medical meaning, that it made no provision for either a pregnant woman's health or the presence of a severely deformed fetus. In effect, Garin said they saw the statute as a sneak attack on Roe and that it awakened their sense that this was the last arena in which government should be involved.
This is not a new political opinion. In recent years, right-to-lifers made three stabs at subverting Roe via state referendums on partial-birth abortion in the disparate environments of Maine, Colorado, and Washington state. Each one of them lost after more thorough debates.
That is why the issue needs more elevated discussion. Republicans are already nervous about the double-impact of a prolife veep and approval of another right-to-life platform plank.
The prochoice community needs to respond to the nervousness by raising the profile of abortion rights, not just in Al Gore's campaign but in tight Senate races like those in Missouri, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and even a longer shot like Pennsylvania.
The right to choose really does hang by a thread, and George W. Bush really is committed to ending it.
Thomas Oliphant is a GLobe columnist.
