"Almost" A Constituency

The latest ruckus, with Barack Obama turning to so-called "ex-gay" gospel singer and preacher Donnie McClurkin in his bid to sway voters away from Hillary Clinton in South Carolina has all the trappings of high farce, especially if you factor in web reports that the "x" in McClurkin's "ex-gay" is more like a "y," as in, "why don't we get busy, fella?"

And the fact that, even as Obama embraces the anti-gay singer, and his main rival, Clinton, pals up to the Rev. Harold Mayberry (another anti-gay black preacher, this time one who compares being gay to being a thief), both the Deomcratic front-runners made it a point to appear on LOGO's televised forum about GLBT issues, just makes me laugh.

For all the talk about doing things "differently" or starting something "new," Obama and Clinton are pretty much doing things the same old-fashioned way: offering the occasional minor gesture or word to encourage the GLBT voters while not actually doing anything that would make straight voters (still, in 2007, awfully suspicious of their GLBT fellow citizens) nervous.

The whole thing reminds me of the Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous, where Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) warns the impressionable young William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a would-be music journalist, about rock stars.

"These people are not your friends," Bangs tells Miller. "They'll take you on tour, make you feel cool..." Bangs tries to explain that all these really great things are just flash with no substance, and that all the rock stars want is for the music journalist to write a worshipful article.

"But I've met you," Bangs sums up. "You're not cool."

No, and neither are we. GLBT people may be cultural leaders, business leaders, the quiet but industrious backbone of creative arts, we may even be so-called tastemakers, but we're not cool. We're more or less where the Irish and the blacks were a hundred years ago: entertaining, as long as we seem harmless.

Poltiicans can mouth along to our songs ("We Are Family," "I Will Survive," hell, why not even "We Shall Overcome"), but they don't speak out language and they don't want to appear to speak our language. They want to garner our votes without risking any votes. That means whatever superficial solidarity they may cast our way is likely to have a tendency not to lead to larger, more decisive policies.

I like Barack Obama. I wanted him to win the nomination... but not any more. yes, Hillary Clinton has anti-gay friends from the religious right, too, and she has them for the very same calculating, cynical reasons the Obama has them. But this episodes with McClurkin makes clear Clinton's point: politics is a dirty, filthy business, and those who get into it and survive and do something good with it have to have the backbone and the know-how to navigate its treacherous labyrinth.

Clinton bashed Obama for being inexperienced; Obama bit back, but hiring McClurkin only proved Clinton's point. Clinton knows how to make use of the anti-gay religious right to make herself more palatable to the so-called Christians. Obama, on the other hand, seems to think he can drive the big white van on both sides of the road at once.

I still like Obama, but he's got a lot to learn. The GLBT vote was his to lose, and he's pretty much lost it. There's nothing to be done for it but to put the guy back in the Senate and let him gather the kind of work and life experience he's going to need to make his lofty words line up with the miserable business of welding together the parts and pieces of a national constituency in order to move us forward as a country. That's leadership; and knowing enough not to put an anti-gay preacher front and center in your campaign, after you've been buttering up the GLBT crowd, marks the difference between leadership and vision. Vision is that which Obama already possesses in plenty; leadership is that which he needs to hone and refine.

Clinton belongs to a dynasty after spending eight years in the White House as First Lady. But those years, and her service as a senator for New York, have given her a certain savvy. If there's anything we need right now, savvy is it: we've gone with swagger for the last six years, and swaggered ourselves right into the wilds. It's going to take someone with both book learning and street smarts to negotiate a way back to our nation's proper path.

Come Nov. 6, I'll be voting for Hillary and wishing Obama the best of luck in 2016.

As for Obama, well: he's "almost" a candidate, and we're "almost" his constituency. But not quite yet.