In a Wednesday post, Esquire blogger Charles Pierce warned that Republicans might use the uproar over childhood vaccines as “a wedge to split the Democratic party,” and urged lefty anti-vaxxers to “STFU” in order to discourage GOPers from exploiting the issue.
Pierce remarked that the “very active, and loud, liberal claque opposed to compulsory vaccination” makes Democrats vulnerable, and noted that “both Hillary Clinton and [then-presidential candidate Barack Obama] wobbled on the issue a bit while campaigning six years ago.”
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
[W]e've been making sport of people like Chris Christie and Rand Paul over their sudden turn to the anti-vaccination fringe of the public policy universe. But [Christie] and [Paul] may be playing a long, deep game…
…[T]here is a very active, and loud, liberal claque opposed to compulsory vaccination. Two of the states with the loosest laws regarding exemptions from mandatory vaccinations are Oregon and Vermont, neither of which will be voting for Scott Walker in 2016. And both Hillary Clinton and the president wobbled on the issue a bit while campaigning six years ago.
So this is what I'm thinking. The Republicans will use this as a wedge to split the Democratic party along the Nervous Parent fault-line that is rivening it. This fault line may well crack open between classes, as the wealthier left seems more inclined toward using Internet quackery to protect their little snowflake babies. And it might well crack open along age lines, as younger voters -- the ones who grew up in a country without measles, and without polio, and without whooping cough, and without freaking smallpox, because of vaccination protocols -- seem less inclined toward herd immunity than the older members of the herd.
Quite simply, the anti-vaccination left should treat itself to a large glass of STFU. Not only is it contributing in its own way to a public-health crisis, but, politically, so far, it's only Republicans who have made an actual issue out of this anti-science foolishness. I would be inclined to let them have it. Yes, both sides have people who are dancing to this particular tune, but only one of them thinks it hears a political symphony in a cacophony of ignorance. Of course, for the past several decades, Republicans have demonstrated an ear for that kind of thing.
