The entire premise of haberdasher Jim Lembke's run for the south St. Louis 1st District Senate seat is that he will ride a wave of rabid "pro-life" support into office.  His plan is for anti-choice groups like Missouri Right to Life to beat the streets and pound the pulpits in favor of his candidacy, propelling him past better qualified Democratic opposition.

At each turn, he has painted himself as a crusader for the forced-childbirth cause, railing against the right of women to make determinations about their own lives and pointing to all who contradict him as "cloners" and murderers.  He has leveraged his every effort into concocting a mythology about his own status as King among the anti-rights, anti-research crowd.

The problem for Lembke?  The most important of the groups which he plans to rely on for support doesn't --by its own measure-- have a particularly high opinion of Lembke's recent history as a legislator.  Those he believes to be his base he has stood with only about half the time over the last year.

Take a look at the legislator voting scorecard of Missouri Right to Life (MRL) from 2007 [1].  In the most recently completed session, Jim Lembke voted with Missouri Right to Life on only 9 of 16 votes that rated inclusion in the organization's scorecard.  For those keeping score at home, that means Lembke voted with MRL --the group that he expects to be his ticket to the Senate-- a whopping 56% of the time.

I wonder if other legislators whose Right to Life records were similar to Lembke's in 2007 are also counting on MRL to carry them on their shoulders in the 2008 elections?  House members who scored comparably on MRL votes in '07 included such noted pro-life stalwarts as Jeanette Mott-Oxford and Beth Low (both 8 of 16 MRL rated votes for 50%).  Lembke should note that those legislators label themselves as pro-choice.  

Given all that, it does seem a bit odd that Lembke has mortgaged his political future on the proposal that anti-choice groups like MRL will power him to greater heights despite the fact that he hasn't been a particularly good ally to them in the recent past. 

And there's no reason to believe Lembke's trend of turncoating on the anti-choice community is slowing down.  Just this week, in fact, Lembke cast a vote in favor of passage for House Bill 7.  That vote is likely to be a rated vote for Missouri Right to Life when its 2008 scorecard is released.  MRL's position on HB7?  "Vote against."

Does Jim Lembke really thinks he's fooling anyone other than himself?