Kari Lake Is the Worst of the Contemporary GOP

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, April 14, 2024

 

Kari Lake is personally opposed to abortion.

 

The GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, whose brand is a combative, never-back-down MAGA politics, has adopted a position on the issue that is nearly indistinguishable from that of double-talking Democrats.

 

She has gone from backing an 1864 law that she praised as “prohibit[ing] abortion in Arizona except to save the life of a mother” to sounding like Tim Kaine.

 

In a slickly produced video that feels like an SNL parody of a politically spooked pro-lifer desperately trying to court the pro-choice side, she earnestly intones, “I chose life, but I’m not every woman. I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices, so that she can make that choice that I made.”

 

If this is taken literally, it means that she is functionally pro-choice. Sure, she’d prefer it if women made the same decision that she did, but if they abort their unborn children, hey, who is she to object, since it’s such “a personal and private issue”?

 

Lake went on to say she’d oppose a federal ban on abortion.

 

To be fair, she’s under extreme pressure given the revival of the politically unsustainable 1864 law, but it’s not as though she’s unwilling to take risks for things she feels deeply about.

 

She threw away her gubernatorial race in 2022 with her gratuitously insulting posture toward McCain voters in the state and her insane decision to campaign with Steve Bannon in the final days of the general election.

 

In 2022, it was all-in on MAGA bombast, no matter the electoral consequences; now, in 2024, it’s fold on an issue of profound moral import at the first sign of trouble.

 

Lake has tried to downplay her embarrassing election denialism, both regarding 2020 and her own race in 2022, after realizing that it’s toxic to her chances of winning in the state, and she’s genuinely been attempting to moderate her image.

 

Still, it’s too much for her simply to apologize for her McCain comments in 2022.

 

And she won’t say whether Vice President Mike Pence should have certified the presidential electors in 2020.

 

She is committed to not trespassing against tenets of MAGA orthodoxy — that the 2020 election was stolen, that Mike Pence let everyone down — but extremely flexible when it comes to the fate of unborn children.

 

She’s Marjorie Taylor Greene on things Trump cares about and Susan Collins on life.

 

She’s a MAGA lioness and a pro-life paper tiger.

 

Lake is a prodigiously talented communicator. But having made a career in TV news and then rocketing to political stardom — if not actual elected office — by taking up the fashions of the Right, she might, to put it mildly, underestimate the power of sincerity.

 

If she wasn’t an authentic pro-lifer, there’s no reason to believe that she’s an authentic quasi-pro-choicer — or an authentic anything other than an extremely ambitious politician with no moral compass.