Campaign Diaries

Ever since Barack Obama’s election, a lot has been made about a supposed feud between the incoming Administration and the “angry Left.” Most of those reports were widely overblown. There was very little public criticism, for instance, of Hillary Clinton’s appointment at Secretary of State or Rahm Emanuel’s designation as Obama’s Chief of Staff.

But the past week has created the first legitimate battle between liberal groups and Obama over the choice of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Warren has acquired a reputation as a moderate cleric, but his position on gay rights are as socially conservative as any of the more obviously controversial religious leaders.

That Warren’s church helps fight AIDS in Africa with one hand doesn’t erase the fact that he opposes gay rights in the United States with the other.

Warren’s campaign in favor of California’s Proposition 8 certainly worsens the situation, and he did so using very venomous rhetoric:

“Rick Warren: I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

Steven Waldman: Do you think, though, that they are equivalent to having gays getting married?

Rick Warren: Oh I do.”

Predictably, gay right groups are furious with Warren’s pick, and this is more than a symbolic dispute: By delivering this high-profile invocation in a governmental ceremony, Warren and his anti-gay diatribes are legitimized in the mainstream of American discourse, thereby increasing the credibility of Saddleback’s pastor.

Only a month has passed since Prop 8, and gay rights groups are using its passage as a rallying cry to energize people into action - so it certainly does not help that Warren is given such a high-profile role at the inauguration while gays are once again shut out of all Cabinet positions and while the transition team has been hinting that they might delay Obama’s pledge to repeal “don’t ask don’t tell.” As Marc Ambinder explains,

“After their experience with President Bill Clinton, the gay  community is unusually sensitive to getting the shorter angle of presidential triangulation. It is hard to overstate the optimism and excitement that gays and lesbians felt in 1992…. but, in the eyes of the gay political community, his commitment to gay rights vanished both times it counted most.”

Just as predictably, Barack Obama invoked his promise of bipartisan to justify the Warren pick:

“What I’ve also said is that it is important for America to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues… Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak, and that dialog, I think, is a part of what my campaign’s been all about, that we’re never going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.”

This statement is strikingly reminescent to Obama’s response to the McClurkin controversy in the summer of 2007; then, the Democrat called on LGBT groups to accept the presence of a vocal supporter of the “ex-gay movement” at Obama rallies in the name of “dialogue.” While dialogue is always good, it is doubtful that speakers who defend discrimination against groups other than the LGBT community would have been invited to speak at the inauguration.

Furthermore (as TPM notes) it is striking that dialogue with people of contrary positions rarely involves reaching out to people at the political left. Obama and his team certainly do not belong to that group, so should dialogue not go leftward as well? This also applies to Obama’s Cabinet.

We have heard a lot about the “team of rival” structure of Obama’s team, but the team is not very diverse ideologically. Most of Obama’s picks are moderate-to-conservative Democrats, and imports from the Right or the center (Robert Gates, Ray LaHood, Jim Jones, Ken Salazar, Hillary Clinton on foreign policy) are not at all compensated with imports from the Left. (Update: Hilda Solis was just tapped for Secretary of Labor, one of the first Cabinet appointments about which the Left appears genuinely excited; in fact, this is probably the happiest the Left has been since Obama started making appointments.)

Ken Salazar’s pick at Interior Department was the first sign that even the lower-profile positions were being packed by conservative Democrats. The New York Times article recapping the reaction to Salazar is very instructive, as most environmentalists express skepticism while “oil and mining interests” praise the Colorado Senator.

What is most striking is that the transition team simply does not seem to care. If anything, First Read suggests this morning that Obama’s team is happy to walk all over gay rights - and do so as noisily as possible - given the rising white evangelical population.

That Obama picked Warren with no warning signal and without bothering to compensate the move with a sign of friendship towards gay rights groups suggests either that Obama’s team is purposely heightening wedge issues in consciously planned Sister Souljah moments (which is what Bill Clinton did in 1993 and 1996 and what First Read suggests is going on now) or that Obama’s team was unaware of how much controversy Rick Warren’s pick would create. The latter possibility isn’t much more reassuring than the former - and it would not be the first instance of a tone-deaf approach to gay rights.