Month: November 2008

I have long despaired of the Human Rights Campaign approach to gay politics. They don’t get it; they never have; they never will. That goes for state organizations staffed and run by people with the same mentality. A reader writes:

I worked for both the No on 8 campaign and the Obama campaign this year and cannot tell you how far apart those two were in style and substance.  One was top down, the other bottom up.  Ironically, it was the presidential campaign that was the grassroots model, not the state-level proposition campaign. As soon as I started working for the No on 8 campaign I was amazed at the level of scripting: "don’t say ‘civil rights,’ don’t say ‘constitution,’ don’t say ‘gay.’" I couldn’t believe it.

  One of the most brilliant things about the Obama campaign was that they didn’t expect callers and canvassers to be policy wonks.  They just said "tell your story, let people know why you’re voting for him.  Connect with people."  I can’t help but feel at this point that if the gloves were taken off we could’ve helped people get a grip on the real issues at stake here, which I happen to think is a matter of soiling the state constitution.

What was even more confounding was the No on 8 campaign’s decision to stay away form polling places at churches and schools.  First of all, most polling places are at churches and schools, and second, that mentality buys right into the Yes on 8 brainwashing campaign that same sex marriage is going to corrupt our morals and our children.  This idiocy was obvious to everyone that I worked with on the campaign.  What was going on with the leadership upstairs?!!!

It’s the Clinton-Democratic-Establishment approach. It never works. But they will never change.

Greenwald advocates repealing DOMA. Well: it’s part of the Obama platform. But my own view is that the advocacy work should take precedence. I’m uncomfortable with a legal strategy alone. We need to do a much better job of communicating the moderate, conservative reasons for why marriage equality is a great thing for all of us. We need especially to get more serious about the African-American community. I’ve been writing about the racial divide on gay rights and HIV since 1990; there has not been much progress since. And there are still some gay black leaders whose refusal to accept that gays have a huge problem with the African-American population has impeded efforts to foment change.

Todd Purdum on Rahm Emanuel:

He doesn’t piss people off for the sake of scoring debating points or asserting his purity. He pisses people off because he cares about things, and sometimes pushes too hard. He lives by an old saying prevalent in F.D.R.’s Washington: “Keep all the balls in the air without losing your own.”

He’s still an asshole. But assholes often get things done. And his brother, Zeke, knows more about healthcare than most mortals can absorb without a brain-freeze. (I went to grad school with Zeke and found him insufferable too. A good person and very brilliant, but, man, a pain in the ass.)

Will not be divorced:

The California Attorney General, Equality California, and the nation’s leading LGBT legal groups agree that the marriages of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who married between June 16, 2008 and the possible passage of Proposition 8 are still valid in the state of California and must continue to be honored by the state.

Now those 18,000 married couples will be the prime argument for reversing this in due course. At the ballot box. This is how inter-racial marriage became accepted: because of the wonderfully reassuring fact of inter-racial couples, even in states where miscegenation was still outlawed. Chin up, guys. Be proud. You are the tip of the spear. Become the change we want to see in the world.

Gelman has a bunch of fancy charts. This one is telling:

(Photo: at the White House today by Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty.)

Megan gages what the economic situation will allow:

Democrats do not have the luxury of proposing unpassable legislation in order to look like they’re doing something.  They can’t make good on Obama’s electoral promises about global warming by putting up a program the Republicans hate enough to take down, because there aren’t enough Republicans to credibly blame for the bill’s destruction.  So they either have to actually pass a carbon bill that will be massively unpopular when it raises energy prices, or explain why Obama didn’t really mean it.

That almost certainly means, at least according to the crack political team on the panel with me, that we will not get any sort of cap and trade–an outcome that probably could have been predicted when gas hit $4.  But it makes even potentially popular things like Obama’s health care plan and middle class tax cuts problematic.  The middle class tax cuts are, as far as I can tell, already stillborn; in today’s revenue environment, even reversing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy probably wouldn’t pay for them.   But once the electorate finds out that the Democrats will not be handing out free money, not because the Republicans stopped them, but because they stopped themselves, they’re going to find themselves mired in a very difficult discussion. Interest rates, sovereign debt problems, and the debt substitution effect do not make good sound bytes.

Michael Ledeen shows impressive resistance to reality:

The continued trashing of Sarah Palin — IMHO the most qualified and by far the most exciting candidate of the four — is very disappointing, and the rash of unseemly whining from the McCain camp just shows once again why so many of us were depressed when he won the nomination.

Italics mine. Gabriel Malor has the same affliction. But they’re missing the point. Palin was a farce; but McCain was a bigger farce for picking her. It’s his responsibility, not hers. He was a total cynic who revealed his decision-making was as ludicrous as it was reckless. In that one decision, he disqualified himself from the presidency.