THE SHOCK OF LEARNING OBAMA IS RADICALLY PRO-ABORTION

Wonder why Barack Hussein Obama's been plunging in the polls?  Consider how he's elevated a policy dispute into a character issue.

Sen. Obama thinks he can sell icicles to Eskimos.  That self confidence is likely what brought him to Pastor Rick Warren's mega-church last weekend to woo evangelicals.

Mr. Obama thought he had an opening, because religious young people are as attracted to what's hip and cool as much as their less religious contemporaries, and young evangelicals tend to be very concerned about the environment and helping the poor.

But far and away the most important issue for evangelicals, young and old, is abortion, and Sen. Obama has one of the most radically pro-abortion records of any politician in America.  The less evangelicals — and most ordinary Americans — know about it, the better for Sen. Obama.  So a politician with less ego and more judgment would have stayed as far away from the Saddleback Church as possible.

In 2003, Sen. Obama voted against a bill in the Illinois legislature which would have protected the lives of infants born alive after botched abortions.  The language of the bill was virtually identical to the language of the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which had passed the U.S. Senate unanimously the year before.

The state bill had been introduced because a nurse, Jill Stanek, had testified that at the hospital where she worked, "abortions" were performed by inducing the birth of a pre-viable fetus and then leaving it to die.  Illinois' attorney general had ruled the hospital was breaking no existing law.

Pastor Warren didn't bring up Sen. Obama's abortion record during the forum.  The trouble happened afterward, when a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network noted the National Right to Life Committee had issued a press release on his 2003 vote, and asked Mr. Obama about it.

"Here's a situation where folks are lying," he responded.  "I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported — which was to say, that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born — even if it was the consequence of an induced abortion."

In Chicago, inconvenient records (and sometimes people) have a tendency to disappear, so perhaps Sen. Obama thought nobody would bother to check — or be able to check — to see whether or not his statement was at variance with the facts.

But the next day, after the National Right to Life Committee released copies of both the federal bill and the bill Obama killed in the Illinois legislature, an Obama spokesman acknowledged his boss had "misstated" his position.

The controversy has raised the profile of an issue that, alas, only about 20-25 percent of Americans really care much about.  But there are a lot of pro-life Democrats in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The potency of this issue was illustrated by the reaction of Democratic consultant Bob Beckel on the Hannity & Colmes program Tuesday night (8/19).  When host Sean Hannity told him of the vote, Mr. Beckel refused to believe it.  It had to be a Republican smear, he bellowed.

But it isn't.

"(Obama) voted against legislation that would have protected the rights of children who survived an attempted abortion," said Peter Wehner on a National Review blog.  "That fact is so stunning, and its implications so brutal that Beckel and (liberal co-host Alan) Colmes could not process it.  They assumed it had to be impossible."

"Some Ohio politicos told me that focus group data showed the Born-Alive issue to be highly radioactive," wrote Peter Kirsanow on the same blog.  "Almost no one had heard about it, but when told the specifics, the reactions were nearly universal: brief incredulity followed by revulsion."

"Two of my daughter's classmates watched clips of Obama calling the Right to Life people liars, and the subsequent debate that followed on Hannity and Colmes," a listener wrote to radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt.  "Both her friends (Obama supporters) were shocked by his callousness, his obvious prevarications, etc., and by the time they left, were seriously impacted by Obama's position."

Many who aren't revolted by Sen. Obama's vote will be uneasy about his clumsy efforts conceal it.  He's issued four different explanations for his vote which, Mr. Kirsanow says, are "either demonstrably false, inconsistent with other explanations, and/or flatly nonsensical."

It's usually the cover up that gets you.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.