Laura Flanders: To Beat the Right, Clinton and Obama Need to Be Clear About Supporting Gay Rights

The following excerpt is adapted from Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians by Laura Flanders (Penguin, 2007).

In 2004 it was Swift Boating. In 2008 will it be gay-baiting that skewers the Democratic candidate? It's not too late for Democratic contenders to start thinking about the so-called culture wars. Indeed they'd better do more than think, if the campaign so far is any indication of where it might be headed.

Ann Coulter's not going anywhere. There was tut-tutting in the media when she told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that she couldn't talk about John Edwards without using the word "faggot," but the crowd in attendance roared. I suspect her trial balloon's not burst yet.

When General Peter Pace, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Chicago Tribune that homosexuality was immoral and should be prosecuted, the response of the Democratic front-runners was worse than weak. Asked to respond to Pace's assertions, both of the Democrats' lead money-raisers prevaricated.

Is homosexuality immoral, an ABC reporter asked Hillary Clinton point-blank: "I'm going to leave that to others to conclude" she answered. When asked by Newsday, repeatedly, if same-sex relationships were immoral, Barack Obama changed the subject: "I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters...That's probably a good tradition to follow."

Both candidates' spokespeople tried to massage those messages in the hours that followed, to little effect. A few days later, Senator Clinton released a third statement, in writing: "I disagree with what he [Pace] said and do not share his view, plain and simple," said Clinton.

But nothing Senators Clinton or Obama has said so far is anywhere near as simple as a "no" to the question of whether homosexuality is immoral. Or as plain as a plain-old "yes" to the notion that this nation's constitutional protections are supposed to apply equally to everyone. Only John Edwards seems to have learned that a direct answer isn't fatal. Asked by Wolf Blitzer "Is homosexuality immoral" he answered "I don't - don't share that view."

The reality is that national Democrats rarely speak plainly about anything to do with the so-called culture wars. To the contrary, Democrats running for a president typically run for cover when any gay related topic comes up. Worse, having utterly failed to tackle the topic with anything resembling principle (or panache) they blame the victim when homophobes win the day.

In 2004, election night wasn't even over before the best paid consultants in the land were blaming Kerry/Edwards defeat on gays, abortion, and the so-called "social issues." On a conference call with high ranking campaigners, Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, (which had turned out voters and trained key activists in several battleground states) heard Clinton consultant Harold Ickes sum up the race in a single sentence: gay marriage "lost us Ohio."

By the end of the week, the pundits weren't only diagnosing the problem, they were prescribing solutions for it: "The Democrats have become a party too dominated by social issues ..." wrote Nation contributor Marc Cooper. Democrats need to turn their attention "away from culture and back toward class," wrote Alan Brinkley in the liberal American Prospect.

The culture wars, wrote Thomas Frank, are not about culture at all, "they are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class," which is what Democrats must confront directly "with genuine economic populism." In his book, liberal evangelical James Wallis urged a departure from the "bifurcating politics of liberal and conservative, Left and Right," to open up a new "politics of solutions."