Yesterday, Live Action News released a new attack on John Kasich’s squishy approach to abortion supporters, this time inspired by his recent Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace.

Live Action focuses on the blatant contradiction between Kasich’s strong support of a government shutdown over the budget in 1995 and his now apparent unwillingness to pursue a government shutdown over defunding Planned Parenthood.

In Kasich’s mind, defunding Planned Parenthood is just not worth a government shutdown because Obama is so opposed to the proposal, and “when you shut the government down, people don’t like it.”

But as Live Action counters, “true leadership consists of understanding the public’s views, but also knowing how to persuade them to change when necessary.”

Furthermore, this approach to a shutdown was perfectly viable to Kasich in order to pass a balanced budget under the Clinton administration in 1995, despite Clinton’s uncompromising stance on the budget that equals Obama’s unwillingness to defund Planned Parenthood.

The only remaining reason for Kasich to legitimately oppose shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood, Live Action concludes, is if he thinks that “a national debate over dueling statistics and competing fiscal forecasts somehow has greater intuitive force than the raw, unparalleled evil of not merely destroying undefined cells but rending recognizable babies limb from limb, of dissecting human children like frogs.”

Anna Pfaff works for American Principles in Action.