Jack, if Prof. Kmiec [ACM — my apology] if Obama actually believed that “Roe is not an endorsement of abortion,” that would indeed make Obama a “different type of candidate” in the sense of being, you know, more stupid than the average candidate. Of course, he is not an idiot, so I guess the question — especially given what we now know about the adamance of Obama’s opposition to Illinois’ version of the Born-Alive Act — becomes whether Kmiec thinks that, for Obama, Roe is “an affirmation that [infanticide] is a moral question for which only the potential mother can give answer.”
But that aside, how does Prof. Kmiec possibly allow himself to write the following: “Obama’s theory of government is to put the human person at the center — to not have the government impose from top-down …”? Maybe he’s just talking about Obama’s theory of government on abortion (or, better, what Kmiec rationalizes as Obama’s theory). If the context is broader than abortion, the statement is the antithesis of Obama’s theory of government.
As Stanley Kurtz recounts in this important Weekly Standard article on Obama’s years as an Illinois legislator (i.e., the years the Obama campaign will be even less anxious to discuss now), Obama’s theory of government is dogmatically Big Government leftist, and even his theory of politics, in its hardcore race-consciousness, has elevated group discipline over the freedom of the human person. (I am talking, of course, of Obama’s theories as practiced, not as packaged.)