Gulp. GOP may win on Schiavo issue?

Noam Scheiber makes an interesting (and frightening) point on his New Republic blog. I'm going to reprint a big part of it here, and I have a bad feeling that he's right. I also think it undermines TNR's recent spate of arguments in favor of Democrats moving to the right-- after all, the public agrees with Dems on pretty much everything. But we keep losing, in spite of the fact that Dems have played Mr. Nice Guy for the last four years. We need to be articulating our positions, not acting like they aren't really our positions. Anyway, here's (part of) Scheiber's post:

I think Democrats face a similar risk with respect to Schiavo. Since the 1960s, the party has tended to take a libertarian position on social issues like abortion and the right to die. As with the U.N. and alliances, polls show that these are overwhelmingly popular positions. Large majorities agree that the government should stay out of people's personal decisions even in socially conservative regions like the South. My concern is that, despite the public support for these individual positions, embracing them tends to reinforce deeper suspicions people have about Democrats--namely, that they're a bunch of moral relativists who can't be trusted to do what's right. (Obviously Republicans got a lot of mileage out of this caricature this last election.) The right is already beginning to frame the Schiavo episode that way (apologies to George Lakoff). Here, for example, is how a spokesman for the conservative group Concerned Women for America put it in today's Washington Post:

"It was necessary and very touching to see [Bush] was willing to go to those lengths [i.e., fly back from Crawford] to help this abused woman. ... This is an issue of right and wrong, and what President Bush has done is come down on the side of right, which is to protect life."

Republicans aren't stupid. They've built their majority by losing individual battles that help them win broader political wars. I hope this issue will turn out differenly, but so far I've seen nothing to convince me that's the case.