President Bill Clinton may play nice with the nancies, but democratic political consultant Bob Shrum’s new book, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner suggests that Clinton may just be playing politics.
As Newsweek wrote back in 2004, Clinton may have urged then Presidential Candidate John Kerry to endorse local bans on gay marriage, but Shrum, who organized Kerry’s campaign, maintains that Clinton actually meant a national amendment.
Via Politico:
Clinton, Kerry reported at the time, did suggest blunting Bush’s appeal to cultural conservatives with a reprise of Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment in 1992 when he’d denounced her call for violence against whites – and done it as conspicuously as possible in front of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
“Kerry, Clinton ventured, should consider defying Democratic interest groups by endorsing the Bush proposal for a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.”
Shrum reports that “this was a flip-flop too far for Kerry.”
It’s also worse in Shrum’s version – the federal amendment, versus state amendments – than in Newsweek’s telling. And Bill Clinton does, reportedly, continue to play a small role in Hillary’s campaign.
Not surprisingly, some are wondering whether Hillary will follow in her husband’s false footsteps. The kids over at Bloggernista write:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Edwards has come out strongly for LGBT equality as has Barack Obama. Neither supports marriage equality, but they are far and away better than the other major candidates on gay issues. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has spoken a fair game, but when the campaign gets tougher can we expect her to follow advice similar to what her husband gave to Kerry in 2004?
We wish we could say “no”, but we honestly can’t. We love Hillary, we really do, but she’s certainly an opportunist. Not that the others aren’t, of course…
Qjersey
Hillary is a player, she won’t say ANYTHING that can be used against her until forced. She’ll probably come out for civil unions nationwide…eventually.
adamblast
Bill Clinton fed Gay America to the wolves for political capital every chance he got. He wanted our money, and talked about equality, and then sold us out time and time again. I’m not surprised that he advised Kerry to do the same thing.
Hillary has a long, long way to go to earn my trust–and other gays should feel the same.
In fact, *none* of the Democratic candidates are talking about gay rights as a matter of principal and fundamental equality. They hedge and offer as few tidbits as possible, balancing our votes against the votes of bigots that they’re unwilling to alienate.
Unrelated:
It’s cool that you’ve required logins & passwords for comments; maybe now you won’t be plagued with those damn spambots so much.
You might make slightly more obvious the fact that you can change/personalize your password after getting your system-generated one. (I almost gave up on comments before I started, thinking I’d be stuck with the password that was sent. I visit too many sites every day for that kind of nonsense.)
Good luck with the new layout!
BillieXX
Pleeeze. If you are shocked by this then you are a bit too naive for me. It’s about votes people, not gay rights.
Lamb Cannon
Right you are, BillieXX, and since i would never vote for any of these sock puppets anyway, good to have that made clear. fuck hillary and “nationwide civil unions.” personally am more intersted in removing the special rights away from heteros as the whole concept of mawwiage blows dead bears IMHO.
please remember this fact the next time y’all are belittling Al Sharpton, my li’l queerios.
nice new format by the by!
Gregg
There is no way in hell Hillary can win. Why are people actually discussing her? It’s ridiculous.
Plus, she’s a bigger opportunist than Bill was. No self-respecting gay person can vote for her. Third party all the way!!!
Ryan
Of course, they’re all opportunists, but they clearly don’t agree on what will help them win. Hillary, I think, realizes that GBLT voters are important to some extent (at least in the primary) – but I truly think she thinks we’re mostly low-information voters. I don’t understand a lot of the support she gets in the gay community, especially among lesbians, so maybe she’s right.
I hope she’s not. I think Edwards understands better that we could very well be the few percentage points between victory and defeat – and these things usually come out pretty close – so he’s playing it smart, especially being the only candidate I know of who is opposed to DOMA. However, Shrum has revealed a few nasty things about Edwards that the former candidate for VP has yet to challenge. Hopefully, it’ll help Edwards “be there” instead of “not being there” yet on marriage equality.
These candidates need to realize that favoring marriage equality would be a HUGE boon to them during the primary. Furthermore, the country has mvoed far enough to the right side of this issue that it won’t hurt him as a candidate. Heck, it didn’t even really hurt Kerry. People didn’t go to the ballot to vote against Kerry because of gay issues. They went to the ballot to vote on gay marriage bans in many key states – and the same candidates pushed the “R” button on their Diebold machines. It wasn’t a vote against Kerry, it was just a vote for Bush.
What’s important now is that there won’t be very many more constitutional amendments against gay people because – sadly – so many states have voted in their favor. However, that’s a seperate issue (and one that will take decades to likely fix, unless we get rid of DOMA and challenge those suckers in the court). Needless to say, none of the democratic candidates would have very much difficulty winning if they supported marriage equality (and ending the war). Being behind those two issues will equate to massive demoratic – and national – support, and provide for a fairly strong victory come November 2008.
Graywolf48
Clinton is a cheap political whore who NEVER did anything that wouldn’t benefit Bill Clinton. The man’s a liar and a phony who triangulated issues that resulted in many bad policies and laws.
He gave us DOMA, DADT, and signed the communications reform act that enables communications conglomerates to control large numbers of television and radio stations diminishing or eliminating diversity of news a other programming, he opened the door for internet censorship (to control cyberporn), he gave us welfare reform which hurt many poor folks, not to mention NAFTA (the sucking sound was not Monica, but American jobs going south.
Clinton sold out anyone he needed to if it was good for Clinton. This guy is a creep and his wife may be worse because her ambition is even greater than Bubba’s. I just don’t understand the fascination the gay and African American communities have for this duo. The Clinton’s can both go to hell, they’ll never get my money or my vote.