Will Susan G. Komen ever get its groove back following the uproar over its decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood? Already the organization has reversed itself on the funding decision and now Karen Handel, the Susan G. Komen official that many critics suspected of playing a lead role in the initial decision, is out.
In her post-resignation interviews (see video after the jump), Handel defends Komen and its founder and CEO Nancy Brinker instead of taking aim at Planned Parenthood. The only problem is she’s undermining Brinker’s credibility in the process.
From the start up until now, Brinker has insisted that initial decision had nothing to do with abortion politics and that Handel, a former pro-life GOP candidate in Georgia, had no role in the matter. Handel, however, says she did play a key role — and the decision was made at least in part because of anti-choice activists upset that Komen was issuing grants to an organization that provides abortion services.
And it’s not just Handel. In an interview with HuffPost, a Democratic board member of Komen and Planned Parenthood, John D. Rafaelli, also contradicted Brinker’s account, acknowledging that from the start the decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood was about getting Komen out of the abortion debate.
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"Honestly, I didn’t think it through well enough," Rafaelli said. "We don’t want to be pro-choice or pro-life; we want to be pro-cure. We screwed up, I’m saying it. We failed to keep abortion out of this, and we owe the people in the middle who only care about breast cancer and who have raised money for us an apology."
Had Brinker issued a quote like this from the start, then the controversy would have been about Komen finding itself caught in the middle of the abortion fight and floundering to figure out how to get out of the line of fire. Now, however, the organization is straddled with an arguably much larger, more fundamental problem — can Brinker, and by extension Komen, ever restore her credibility?
J Street faced a similar dilemma when the news broke that despite previous denials from its founder and CEO, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the organization was indeed receiving funding from George Soros.
What does an organization do when its existence, effectiveness and public profile is intricately wrapped up with the vision, will and talents of its founder and leader — and then the founder and leader’s credibility is damaged? Well, it seems that in J Street’s case and (at least for now) Komen’s case the organizations and their founders think they are better off waiting out the controversy together than parting ways.
And what does President Clinton have to do with all of this? You can love the former president and believe that the drive to impeach him was a partisan outrage. But his political survival also dealt a huge blow to our standards of public integrity and honesty. Hey, if Clinton can get away with lying about that woman Lewinsky — and having his Cabinet members and political allies lie for him as well — then why should Ben-Ami or Brinker not try to hang on and see if they can continue to do good for their organizations? These days, post-MonicaGate, the standard seems to be that nobility of cause and the need to beat back political adversaries trumps issues of credibility.
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