I'll stay over here with the "elitist intellectuals", thanks.

So this whole ugly nonsense in Pennsylvania is over. In the process we got to watch Hillary Clinton

"'...[throw] the "kitchen sink' at Obama, as her campaign aides described it. Her campaign had been an assault on Obama's character flaws, real and imagined, rather than on matters of substance. Clinton also suffered a bizarre self-inflicted wound, having reimagined her peaceful landing at a Bosnian airstrip in 1996 as a battlefield scene complete with sniper fire. After six weeks of this, according to one poll, 60% of the American people considered her 'untrustworthy' a Nixonian indictment." (TIME Editorial - "The Incredibly Shrinking Democrats")

That sounds pretty bad, yes? And yet somehow, she won. Because somehow, this was not as bad to what happened with Obama. What happened with Obama? Well, this...

"...the American people learned that he was a member of a church whose pastor gave angry, anti-American sermons, that he was "friendly" with an American terrorist who had bombed buildings during the Vietnam era, and that he seemed to look on the ceremonies of working-class life — bowling, hunting, churchgoing and the fervent consumption of greasy food — as his anthropologist mother might have, with a mixture of cool detachment and utter bemusement."

And this is somehow worse than lying and mudslinging. Never mind that he's distanced himself from Reverand Wright since then, never mind that Reverand Wright's comments were quoted selectively and taken wildly out of context to begin with. Never mind that the Vietnam era happened when Obama was in elementary school. Never mind that his comments (which he has apologized for) were actually rather insightful, if poorly-worded.

That last link that I've got there makes a reference to TheMiddleClass.org, a project which rates state representatives "on their performance on votes that pertain to the current and aspiring middle class." They gave McCain a 50% , Clinton a 67% , and Obama a 75%. And in spite of this, people are still convinced by things that the writer of the "TIME" editorial I've been quoting describes as "scurrilous trash". To use another quote:

"...there is an immutable pedestrian reality to American politics: you have to get the social body language right if you want voters to consider the nobler reaches of your message. In his 1991 book, The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of 'low-information signaling' — that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin. In the era of Republican dominance, the low-information signals were really low — how Michael Dukakis looked in a tanker's helmet, whether John Kerry's favorite sports were too precious (like wind-surfing), whether Al Gore's debate sighs over his opponent's simple obfuscations were patronizing."

Low indeed. This is precisely the kind of thing that Obama's been attempting to avoid - incidentally, this is one of the reasons I like him. Hilary Clinton, on the other hand, has been feeding people's desire for "low information" to the point of nausea.

"...downing shots of Crown Royal and promising lower gas prices, attacking her opponent over trivia and threatening to 'obliterate' Iran. It was enough to earn the ire of the New York Times editorial page, which harrumphed, 'By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues ... she undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be President.'"

And the gentleman who wrote that editorial does not seem to be any different from "most people"; immediately following the above quote is this:

"Well, tsk-tsk and ahem! But part of the problem with editorial writers — and, truth to tell, columnists like me — is a narrow definition of the qualifications necessary to be President. It helps to be a warrior, for one thing. It helps to be able to take a punch and deliver one — even, sometimes, a sucker punch. A certain familiarity with life as it is lived by normal Americans is useful; a distance from the élite precincts of academia, where unrepentant terrorists can sip wine in good company, is essential."

Aha, I see. So I guess that drinking shots of liquor while making childish personal attacks and idiotic comments about blowing up foreign countries is the way to show you're in touch with normal people these days? If I were among the blue-collar folks in Pennsylvania, I might have been more offended by this than by anything that Obama said. But instead of being appalled at what her actions implied (does she think they're all hard-drinking warmongers or something?) they ate up every bit of low-information signaling that was fed to them, and Hillary Clinton won the state because of it. It seems to me that this particular group of voters has decided they'd like a candidate who would make a nice drinking buddy, rather than someone who actually knows anything. And now I'm going to extrapolate a little: could it be that this is how we ended up electing George Bush — twice?

(Don't misunderstand me, here; if Clinton wins the nomination, I am not going to vote for John McCain. I'm not just wary of him, I am actually afraid of what might happen if he gets elected... but that's another topic for another post.)

I know that all of these things — the childish personal attacks, the negative campaigning, the "low-information signals" — are part of modern American politics. I am aware of this, and I am disturbed by it. I am disturbed that this seems to be all that people pay attention to, that people would rather base their opinions on a five-second sound clip than a candidate's voting record, that the news media treats a presidential election as nothing more than fodder for scandals. The sorry excuse for a debate that ABC pulled off is only one example of this. It's bad enough that politicians resort to digging up mud to sling at each other, and it becomes even worse when the people who are supposed to be providing us with information encourage this.

Most of all, I am disturbed that a lot of people don't see anything wrong with this. We're simply accepting these things of a fact of life, rather than demanding actual information instead of exaggerations. We're accepting sound-bites instead of demanding some context. And this election is much too important for people to be making decisions based on trivialities: George Bush is leaving us with a giant mess, and his successor is not going to be able to get rid of it with mere lip service to the middle class.

One step at a time.

I recently watched a video on YouTube, of Barak Obama speaking at a rally in Beaumont, Texas: Obama speaks about GLBT and Christianity. Reading through the comments I noticed people pointing out something that I've heard from others as well: Obama is not in favor of gay marriage. In fact, none of the candidates are. And this got me to thinking, which got me to writing this.

To start with, I support Obama. I have a few reasons for this - he stopped taking donations from lobbyists when he began his campaign, he's pretty progressive, he opposes the war (and unlike some people, myself included, he has done so from the start.) And while some people may say he's inexperienced, I think that this isn't necessarily a bad thing: he's been in politics for a while, but not so long that it's made him jaded and cynical. Something that I've noticed a lot of GLBT people and allies pointing out, though, is that while he supports equal rights for gays and lesbians, he's against gay marriage and has only ever supported civil unions. I've seen people calling this inconsistency and even hypocrisy, and saying that he's supporting the idea of "separate but equal".

Well, that's all true. And I'm supporting him anyway, because when it comes to GLBT rights he is probably the best candidate we can hope for right now.

Much as it disgusts me, the fact is that anyone who supported full marriage rights for gays at this point in our history would be committing political suicide. Frankly I'm impressed that he was willing to say what he did in the video: that he's heard people in the Christian community say things that "[aren't] very Christian" about gays and lesbians, and that this is wrong, and that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their sexual orientation. Not only that, he said this in Texas, in front of an audience made up of primarily Christian heterosexuals. Given that, it's impressive that he was so direct about it.

And these aren't empty words, they match his past actions and voting record. He voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, and is in favor of overturning it at the federal level. He was also against the Federal Marriage Amendment, which fortunately didn't pass. He's against the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that the US military still thinks is necessary for some reason. He wants to expand federal hate crime laws to include crimes motivated by sexual orientation. He supports allowing civil unions at a federal level which would be equivalent to marriage in everything but name, and would leave the issue of whether to call it "marriage" up to individual states. This is all stated in a PDF file posted on his website. Not only that, he's repeatedly defended gay rights during his public appearances - even if, as in Beaumont, he was speaking in front a group of people who would likely disagree with him. (This is, by the way, one of the things that separates him from Hillary Clinton; when she speaks about gay rights it's almost always been in front of a primarily gay audience.)

I won't deny that the naming issue bothers me, because of the "separate but equal" concept. But if this is the best we can get right now, I say let's take it. Every single group that has ever been marginalized has had to get through things like this while they fought and waited for society to change. It took African-Americans nearly 100 years to go from being newly-freed slaves to being equal under the law, because for a long time it was widely thought that blacks and whites could not be equal. It took American women until 1920 to be able to vote in all elections, because the general opinion was that women lacked the intelligence to be involved in politics.

Now it's our turn. We're up against the people who think we should replace the Constitution with Leviticus, the people who still think that being gay causes AIDS, and the more "moderate" folks who "don't have anything against gay people, but...". I detest these viewpoints, and I try my best to convince the people who hold them that they're wrong, but I also know that people don't change their minds about these things overnight. I once attended a lecture given by Daryl Davis- he was the first black person to write a book about the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of an interviewer rather than a victim. Most of the Klan members he met with and interviewed eventually became good friends with him and later quit the Klan because of it; some of them even gave him their robes as a kind of symbolic gesture. But there was almost always an in-between period, before the cognitive dissonance set in, where they were both staunch KKK members and friends with a black man.

People can be astoundingly persistent in this kind of doublethink without even realizing it (which is where the "I don't hate gay people, but..." folks come from) and there's not much we can do to change that. This does not mean that we should stop fighting or become complacent, it just means that we need to be patient and take what we can get as it comes along. And if that means calling it a civil union instead of a marriage for the moment, then that's what we should do. Barack Obama isn't being quite as broad-minded as I'd like him to be, but he's offering us a hell of a lot more than anyone else is... so I'm willing to forgive him for that.