1115.org

So I’ve been asking for two years now, “what does Barack Obama’s idea of compromise look like?” The number of people I’ve asked is staggering, from random sycophantic bloggers to Obama supporters doing voter registration in The City, to unanswered emails to his media operation, and the silence has been truly deafening. No one has been able or willing to sketch out how Obama would manage to forge a compromise between modern Republican elected officials and his (supposed) Democratic base. Well, after a week of horrific decision-making and disastrous communications, I think it’s safe to say that we have an answer.

As he tries to set up a campaign firewall in South Carolina, Obama decided to hold a fundraiser with gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, the formerly gay man turned virulent homophobe and bigot. (I wonder if he’s actually the one who coined the phrase “no homo” and not Killa Cam…) When the shit started to get thick, Obama’s campaign released a letter that included the following statement:

Pastor McClurkin believes and has stated things about sexual orientation that are deeply hurtful and offensive to many Americans, most especially to gay Americans. This cannot and should not be denied.

At the same time, a great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin’s beliefs. This also cannot be ignored.

So rather than cut his losses and bounce the ex-gay bigot, Obama decided on an affirmative defense, one that enabled him to steer the debate right into his wheelhouse, compromise. In this case, the resulting picture was one of false equivalence in his words, and transparent pandering in his deeds. He balanced out the ex-gay black bigot with a currently-gay white preacher:

Sidden is the white, gay pastor added to the concert bill as a last minute compromise by the Obama campaign. Sidden’s appearance was notably brief and anti-climactic: He said a short prayer to the auditorium at the very beginning of the program, when the arena was only about half full, and then he left.

America Blog has been following (and driving) this story, so head over there for more details (and hilarious shirts.) The part of this story that fascinates me is how it finally displays what compromise means to Obama and exposes the inconsistency between his lofty rhetoric and the reality of his campaign that will seemingly do anything to win South Carolina. Had this event slipped under the radar, as it would have without blog activism, Obama would have quietly raised a good bit of money and sounded a powerful dog-whistle to South Carolina homophobes that he was with them. But hey, “He may be a homophobe, but he’s not Pat Robertson.” Or so I’ve read.

It’s an interesting contrast to Obama’s donor base which contains more than a few young liberals and Hollywood players. Wonder how they feel now about where their money is going? A few month back, I wrote:

Can anyone imagine Dr. King trying to compromise with segregationists? “You can go on allowing whites-only drinking fountains as long as there are an equal number of coloreds-only fountains.” “Instead of lynching every black man you come across after dark, can we cut that back to three out of every four?” “We understand that you don’t want us to sit in the front of the bus, but how about anything after the first five rows?” Maybe not.

What’s even worse about Obama’s current situation is that unlike segregation, he invented his current mess. And his compromise calculation seems to be “one white gay preacher on stage for a few minutes balances out a headliner who thinks that gays are ‘out to kill your children’ and therefore ‘must be cured.’” It seems that the clip from my previous post, which was meant to be exaggerated for effect, may have undersold it by a fair margin.

If that wasn’t enough, Obama also chose last week to answer his critics who were suggesting that he wasn’t going after frontrunner Hillary Clinton with enough zeal. As far as I’m concerned, for someone so obviously not in the race to win, he’s done his share of Clinton bashing and obscenely hypocritical differentiating on Lieberman-Kyl. But his new line of attack, out of the wealth of targets Clinton has provided is…Social Security. Lots of other bloggers have noted the absurd and counterproductive nature of inserting Social Security back into the debate after the hard-fought victory in 2005. I lost track of how many posts/letters to the editor/emails I wrote back then when I had the time to write every day. Now it feels like at any second, the sleeping giant is going to get out of bed and start trying to ram “reform” down our throats again. How is Obama’s gay-bashing freakshow related to his resuscitation of a long dead boogeyman? Easy, they both provide a narrative for the media and the Right Wing that is potentially deadly.

Obama didn’t have to get into either issue. No Republican, much less the President, has the political capital to do anything about Social Security, and there are plenty of ways for a black man to chase black Democratic primary votes in South Carolina without having to resort to bigotry. But now, a man who isn’t going to win anything forces his (nominal) party into high profile partisan battles unrelated to the issues that will turn the 2008 elections, both Presidential and Congressional. The RNC gets to pump out memos detailing how Obama tried to “compromise” and the bitter partisans and gays crucified him for his troubles. This in turn reinforces the false frame that paints Clinton - no liberal - as the far left choice leading the Commies against the moderate and sensible Obama. And while all of this is playing out, no one is reporting on the Republican clown show where all of the candidates are busy tripping over their respective dicks in the race to the most insane reaches of the right wing. Double Gitmo, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran, All my Democratic opponents are terrorists, etc.

This was a series of unforced errors, and even though Obama made them, he’s not the only one who will pay the price. This is a vanity campaign, no different from Mike Gravel or Joe Biden. It’s always about Obama and nothing else, so if he sandbags his (nominal) party and ends up being labeled the sensible one by the media, he wins even when he loses. I’m starting to regret wondering what compromise meant, this is even worse than I had imagined.