Winning over Obama

President Obama’s announcement yesterday that he supports gay marriage has been followed by everything I expected.  Celebration – more celebration on Facebook than in the streets, but jubilation nevertheless.  And the predictable Republican reaction.  The party who howled with outrage at the idea that progressives were calling their regressive moves on women’s health and reproductive issues a “war on women,” quickly began calling Obama’s remarks the start of a new “war on traditional marriage.”  Other, more clear-eyed and strategic Republicans see political calculation in Obama’s announcement.  And they have been complaining about it.  They are certainly right.  But so what?  In an earlier posting I said:

I'm a proud Democrat, but I am comfortable saying the Democratic Party has seldom been heroic, even if some of its signature legislative achievements have been sweepingly transformative. The party's accomplishments - bringing immigrants into the political process, defending the right of African Americans to vote, improving work conditions for laborers - were often the products of cagey political choices, securing votes so politicians getting rich from public office could remain in office. It has been the party of corruption and compromise, machine politics and patronage. The Democratic Party has always been less a leading man, more a colorful character actor. Now and then, like Ernest Borgnine in Marty, the party brought home the big prize, delivering a social safety net to keep Americans from falling into destitution as they age, guaranteeing civil rights, fighting a war on poverty.  But that's about right. Political parties and the politicians who guide them aren't great causes or prophets. Our prophets - Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King and others like them who took on our society's inequalities and division - weren't politicians.

I’m fine with the fact that this was a politically astute step, and you should be too.  Think about it this way: the Democratic Party, since Roosevelt and Truman shifted the party dramatically to the left, has always addressed its political vulnerability by bringing new voters into the process.  Like Obama’s announced support of gay marriage, Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, and the insertion of a civil rights plank in his 1948 campaign platform, was politically risky.  It had costs.  The Dixiecrats bolted, and the Democratic Party began a long slide in the South.  But in the 1948 general election, Truman captured seventy-seven percent of African American ballots, the first time a Democratic candidate for the White House ever got more than fifty percent of the black vote.  The party’s civil rights stance helped Truman (just barely) win key swing states like California – which was more progressive than the rest of the country - and Illinois and Ohio - overwhelmingly Republican states with large African American populations.

Was Truman thinking about reelection when he issued Executive Order 9981 and integrated the military? Not entirely, but he was responding to political pressure. And once he started down that path, pressure built.  In the spring of 1948 the NAACP issued a Declaration of Negro Voters which encouraged black voters to tie their votes to efforts to follow through on recommendations issued by the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which in October of 1947 had published a landmark report mapping a way forward, through aggressive federal intervention, toward a more inclusive national union.  The integration of the armed forces was one example of targeted federal action, the NAACP and African American voters wanted to see more.

And so our country has lurched forward, with one party – my party – seeing opportunity in activists’ calls to expand inclusion, and reduce poverty, and tackle discrimination.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, has consistently taken a more regrettable path.  While Democrats have tried to win the White House and majorities in Congress by bringing more people into the political process, and championing their political causes, the Republican Party, at least since Richard Nixon, has sought to divide the country and disenfranchise voters. Nixon's southern strategy in 1972 established a playbook, and the Republicans have built their campaigns around wedge issues and division and peddling hate ever since.  Over time, they also developed an interest in removing minority and low-income voters from state voter registration lists.  If they can make it harder for African Americans and Latinos and college students and the poor to vote, they can reduce the Democratic Party’s numerical superiority.  All in all, through regressive voting restrictions and fear Republicans have sought to tear away at the Democratic Party’s advantages in numbers.

The typical voter is a complex, almost incomprehensible combination of different preferences and beliefs.  If, through fear and deception, Republican candidates can convince voters that Democratic candidates want to end their way of life – rather than extend it to those at the margins of society – Republicans can pry working class voters away from the Democratic Party. 

The recent passage of Amendment  1 in North Carolina is a perfect example, and nicely compares with Obama’s choice.  Consider this, from the New York Times:

“We are not anti-gay — we are pro-marriage,” Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the executive committee for the pro-amendment Vote for Marriage NC, said at a victory rally in Raleigh, where supporters ate pieces of a wedding cake topped by figures of a man and a woman. “And the point, the whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design for marriage based on the demands of a group of adults.*"

The strategy was to convince voters that activists were trying to overturn “God’s design for marriage.”  In actuality, the marriage equality movement is fundamentally conservative.  It is a reaffirmation of the role of marriage in our society.  Advocates for gay marriage want to extend the reach of the institution so others can enjoy its legal and social benefits.  While so-called defenders of marriage argue that the pro-LGBT movement is “radical” in its efforts to “redefine marriage,” in truth, there is very little here that seems radical.  A more radical position – one I hold – is that marital status should be irrelevant to our decisions about who we chose to build a home with, or have children with, and legal protections and governmental and employer-supplied benefits shouldn’t be tied to marriage.  

In the end, if I’m asked if Obama’s resistance to marriage equality, and his eventual “evolution” to embrace it are tied to politics, I’ll acknowledge they are.  But so what?  That’s what my party does.  It builds coalitions by expanding the circle of inclusion.  I’m happy about that.

*  Actually, Tami Fitzgerald's point is profoundly wrong, at least for America.  We are a secular democracy, deeply rooted in a tradition of universal rights.  So, in fact, if a "group of adults," i.e. voters and their elected representatives, decide to "rewrite" what one group perceives as "God's design," because that "design" violates the rights of others, then that's what we do.  And we don't apologize for it.  It isn't an attack on their religion.  It is a legal and constitutionally permitted effort to attack bias and overturn unequal public policy.