GP: Now that Barack Obama has all but cinched the Democratic nomination, I am going to offer a prediction which will likely upset some of the Illinois Senator’s most enthusiastic gay supporters in the netroots. Obama will receive the lowest share of the gay vote of any Democratic presidential nominee since pollsters identified gays as a voting bloc.
I expect McCain to hold the gay votes George W. Bush drew in 2004 and pick up about 10-20% of John Kerry’s vote. That would mean the GOP nominee will take somewhere between 30 and 38% of the measured gay vote. His actual gay vote (as was Bush’s) will, in my view, be higher.
Given how much grief we gay Republicans take from our peers for our politics, many of our fellows prefer not to discuss politics. When approached by exit pollsters, they would be less likely to take the time to answer their surveys than would be gay Democrats. That’s why, I believe, George W. Bush may have gotten as much as 30% of the gay vote in 2004 and why McCain could get as much as 40%.
Yet, it seems this year there is less stigma attached to a vote for John McCain. I say this noting the number of gay Democrats (and Democrat-leaners) who have publicly said they would for McCain. It’s not just that they’ve told me. Other friends, some Democrats, have reported that a a good number of their fellows have said they prefer McCain to Obama.
No gay outreach is necessary. These people are aware of John McCain’s opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment and have seen enough of Barack Obama not to trust him.
The real question is whether McCain’s increased share of the gay vote will make a difference. It could help secure his margin in Florida and make him more competitive in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. A lot depends on how other demographic groups break. If Obama continues to do poorly among Catholics, the gay vote could tip the balance in these states–and possibly others as well.
The time has come for Clinton to adopt a gracious and conciliatory tone, end her campaign and endorse Sen. Barack Obama for president.
Tuesday night was, indeed, a game changer. Clinton suffered a drubbing in North Carolina — a “big” state, in her terminology — and barely squeaked out a win in Indiana. She needed a convincing win there and a strong finish in the Tar Heel state to convince voters and, more importantly, donors that she still had a chance to win over the dwindling number of uncommitted superdelegates.
As someone who endorsed Clinton early in the campaign (well before the mainstream media went ga-ga over Obama after his Iowa victory), I saw her as the party’s best chance to beat the GOP nominee and the candidate with the most relevant international experience to tackle the myriad crises inflicted on us by George Bush.
Unfortunately, all the talk of experience and competence was belied by a campaign rife with incompetence. From Bill Clinton’s ruinous (and arguably racist) campaign swing through South Carolina, to an obvious failure to craft a strategy past Super Tuesday, her campaign staff made so many miscalculations that Hillary went from a coronation to a shocking defeat.
And her behavior during the recent and infamous ABC News debate was over the line. During that debate, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos grilled Obama over the Rev. Wright controversy and, incredibly, his thoughts on wearing flag pins. Obama was overdue for some more aggressive questioning from the mainstream media, but not on those topics.
Rather than insist on taking the questioning to a higher level, Clinton gleefully joined the Obama bashing that night. The Obama campaign should never have agreed to a debate in which Stephanopoulos was asking the questions. As a veteran of the first Clinton administration, he could hardly be expected to approach the event with any modicum of objectivity. He’s a celebrity talking head, not a journalist.
In sharp contrast to Clinton’s transparent, over-the-top pandering (downing shots with the locals and touting a phony love of guns), Obama has managed to stay above the fray, even during the darkest moments of the Wright saga. He could have gone sharply negative in the run-up to North Carolina and Indiana, as some advised him to do. Instead, he stuck to his own metaphorical guns and rose above the faux controversies and petty attacks. Even in victory Tuesday night, Obama praised Clinton and promised that his supporters would back her if she emerged as the party nominee.
But she didn’t emerge victorious and the time has come for her supporters, gay and straight, to embrace Obama’s campaign for the White House. The stakes are too high to allow primary race disappointments to demoralize Democratic voters. And the stakes for gay voters are higher.
Just yesterday, Sen. John McCain reiterated his intention to appoint conservative justices in the mold of Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court.
In addition, McCain this week announced creation of his “Justice Advisory Committee,” which will offer advice on Supreme Court picks. Among the members of that group is Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a staunch conservative and notorious opponent of gay rights.
A McCain presidency would set back the cause of gay rights by a generation. A 50-year-old justice could serve 30 years or more on the high court. With same-sex marriage continuing to roil legislatures and courts across the country, it’s only a matter of time before the Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in on recognition of same-sex relationships.
Last week, I moderated a panel discussion on national politics at the annual Equality Forum in Philadelphia. The most heated exchange of the night came when I asked Patrick Sammon of the Log Cabin Republicans whether his group would endorse McCain. He replied that a decision on an endorsement had not yet been made but that Log Cabin was in talks with McCain’s campaign.
Sammon offered praise for McCain’s opposition to a federal marriage amendment.
Indeed, McCain’s opposition to the odious amendment was important and appreciated. But that’s where his support for gay rights begins and ends. McCain opposes the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and extending the federal hate crimes law to cover gays.
Most disturbingly, he supported his home state of Arizona’s ballot initiative that would have banned not only marriage, but civil unions and even domestic partnerships. That extreme Arizona measure remains the only such referendum to be defeated by voters.
It is unconscionable for Log Cabin to entertain a McCain endorsement. Yes, it can be argued that McCain is better on gay issues than Bush, but that’s not saying much. Let’s not be fooled twice by a supposedly moderate Republican candidate. Bush won in 2000 after a pledge of “compassionate conservatism,” which proved an empty slogan. In its place we saw cruel attacks on gay rights, an effort to pervert the U.S. Constitution to discriminate against gays and even public ridicule of our committed, loving relationships during the State of the Union Address.
Log Cabin’s work is important and, as Sammon pointed out, no civil rights struggle has been won with the support of a single political party. Republican allies are critical to passage of gay rights legislation, especially when Democrats are so prone to going wishy-washy on us after they win elections with near unanimous gay support.
But with the Supreme Court in the balance, no gay voter should pull the lever for McCain in November. Sammon’s predecessor, Patrick Guerriero, took a principled stand — for which he was unfairly criticized by some gay Republicans — and declined to endorse President Bush in 2004. Sammon should follow that example and Log Cabin should resist going to bat for someone who has publicly pledged to appoint justices hostile to gay rights advances.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s gay supporters should take a day to mourn her defeat and then join Obama’s cause. She’s resilient and will bounce back, probably as Senate majority leader, a job much more in line with her skills than that of president.
And Obama should continue to reach out to Hillary’s disaffected supporters and work to unite the party. It’s time for Hillary’s gay donors and volunteers to look past short-term disappointments and consider the long-term impact of a McCain administration. It’s a scary thought that renders all other considerations moot.
Responding, Gay Patriot says McCain showed he's no neanderthal by leading the charge against a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on states' rights grounds. On the other hand, McCain turned around and supported an effort to amend his state's constitution to do just that.GP also argues "We don’t need favorable Supreme Court rulings to improve our position in civil society; that’s already happening spontaneously.
"Now, all we need do is make sure the court doesn’t strike down laws state legislatures have enacted recognizing gay unions. And John McCain indicates that he would appoint judges who don’t legislate from the bench, showing respect for conservative justices who have deferred to state legislatures." He regrets that gay activists "look to the Supreme Court as did those in the Civil Rights’ movement."
Gay Republican politics and civil rights litigation is one of those arcane, inside ball affairs where the kind of article that would explain anything meaningfully would bore the reader to death six paras in. We've had experience of both, during a frustrating tenure on the Log Cabin Republicans board in 2000-01, and in same-sex marriage litigation in Washington. For some years now, in marriage litigation, activists have been combing and recombing state supreme court briefs to avoid any remote chance their courts could find a federal issue and boot the case over to the federal courts. One of the main reasons you want to stay out of federal courts is precisely because Appointing judges like Roberts and Alito is the new, smiley-face conservative version of the old, scowling, judges like Scalia and Thomas mantra. Nicer people, to be sure, but pretty much the same result, as the court's last couple of terms have proved. The other main reason everyone should worry about more Supreme Court justices like Alito and Roberts and Scalia and Thomas is because there've been statistic analyses done of each justice's votes since joining the court, measuring the most activist judicial act of all- declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional. The justice who have been the freest waving that big stick? The strict constructionists:
Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %
(Chad Golder and Paul Gewirtz, "So who are the activists?" The New York Times, July 6, 2005)
"Yes, his support of the 2006 Arizona referendum is troubling, but he has shown a greater degree of tolerance for gay Americans than had any of his rivals for the Republican nomination (save Rudy)," GP concludes. Yet, as Keith Olbermann discussed on Countdown last night, McCain has rejected Rev. John Hagee's anti-Catholic rants but not his homophobic ones:
Finding ourselves left with that sort of faint praise is why we're now registered in the Independent voter column, and why voting for a man who has more trouble talking about gay issues even than Hillary Clinton on the faith that he might not be too bad strikes us as a repeat of the mistake we made in our last Republican president vote- in 2000.
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