THE NOTE - With today's planned introduction of gay marriage in Massachusetts, here are some political facts of life (or, at least, some analysis).
This issue ultimately may have an impact on the election, but at this point we don't think it will have an overwhelming influence on the outcome. There is enough volatility and emotion surrounding this issue that in a close election, it could tip the balance in several key states -- as could, it should be Noted clearly, many, many other issues. Iraq, jobs, and health care are certainly going to been engaged by the presidential candidates, neither of whom wants to fight this election out with gay marriage as a central issue, and the activists are unlikely to be able to force it front and center.
1. Since announcing his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages, the President hasn't pushed the issue, to say the least -- there is no war room at the White House to get this done, and that isn't an oversight or an accident.
2. John Kerry would just like this issue to go away.
3. The chance of passing a federal constitutional amendment this year is zero, but measures on gay marriage are likely to appear on several state ballots in November. Although the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee are not overtly encouraging those measures, strategists in both parties agree that their presence will almost certainly boost conservative turnout.
4. Battleground states in which such measures are possible include Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Oregon, Missouri, Michigan, and Minnesota.
5. In those same states -- plus Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and others -- it is almost certainly true that the Republican Party and the Bush campaign will do direct mail and persuasion phone calls to voters talking about the issue -- somewhat under the radar and likely only at the very end of the campaign.
6. Even the cynical among you should not discount the notion that the President backs a national amendment because he thinks it is the right and only way to solve a national problem that his been forced on the country by a handful of judges and activist mayors -- rather than because of a political calculation by Mr. Bush. Conservatives who were heartened when the President came out for the amendment will now be watching to see if he resumes his push for it after Monday.
7. That John Kerry will accept his party's nomination in the state he calls home at a time when the gay marriage issue still will be defined by Massachusetts is going to require a lot of political finesse by his campaign -- and they know it.
8. Kerry's record of voting against the Defense of Marriage Act (along with a handful of liberal Democrats and Daniel Moynihan); being in support of civil unions; being against the federal constitutional amendment; and now being passively in support of a Massachusetts constitutional amendment (after opposing one in the past) is the sort of the quintessential Kerry-style waffling (with some substance behind it) that the Bush campaign hopes to exploit when defining Kerry as an unacceptable, liberal flip flopper.
9. President Bush would have just as much rhetorical, political, and personal trouble answering the question that Kerry stumbled on during last Friday's press conference -- does he personally wish those who will have gay marriages well? Perhaps someone will ask the President the same question&..
10. Vice President Cheney never really has been challenged in a sustained way for his failure to maintain the position he seemed to take in the Veep debate in 2000 -- in favor of letting states sort this issue out, rather than supporting a national constitutional amendment. Democrats cite this all the time as their strongest pushback on the controversy. As a matter of pure political discipline -- consistent (implicit) denial that the personal is the political -- the entire Cheney family is to be applauded.
11. In each of the last three presidential campaigns, one of the two major parties has tried to score political points on the issue of gay rights, and in each of those elections, the party that tried to make it an issue lost the election.
12. Very few Democrats support legalized gay marriage, while the Republican Party is divided on the wisdom of amending the Constitution at this stage of the controversy. Many GOP leaders in Congress have little enthusiasm for trying to get the amending process going.
13. The leading Republican pro-gay rights group, the Log Cabin Republicans, is unhappy with the President's support for the amendment; it isn't clear what they will do about that unhappiness from now through election day. They have run television commercials featuring Cheney's words and asserting their opposition to the amendment.
14. In the main, gay rights groups -- some of which Kerry met with on Friday in Washington -- are part of the liberal left coalition whose overriding mantra is "we badly want to beat George Bush -- check that, we MUST beat George Bush -- and therefore we are willing to overlook flaws in John Kerry."
15. It is almost certainly true that the national political press corps which covers this issue is more accepting of gay marriage than the nation as a whole; it is certainly true that the national political press corps does not fully appreciate the religious, moral, and psychosexual reasons why this is such an emotional matter for opponents of gay marriage.
16. Some suburban voters -- among the most key swing voters in this race -- and others, might be turned off by politicians pushing the issue of banning gay marriage at a time of war or economic crisis -- and/or by a sense that pushing a constitutional amendment to enshrine unequal treatment is unfair and unnecessarily anti-gay. And Republican strategists are well aware of this. This is probably the main reason that Republicans associated with the Bush campaign have only rarely gone after John Kerry on this issue so far.
17. Only in America could this type of legal, legislative, cultural, social, and political fight occur. |
