Rick Warren, Rick Warren, Rick Warren… Name’s kind of familiar… Hey! Isn’t he that guy that makes those ski movies?
It sounds apocrophyl somehow, but supposedly in the 2004 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton gave John Kerry the advice to come out in favor of the various state ballot measures. Kerry rejected the idea. This would show a number of things: Kerry’s integrity, Clinton’s crassness, also Kerry’s lack of a victory in a presidential contest and Clinton’s two.
It has been observed — by Andrew Sullivan, by Dan Savage, probably by others — that John McCain received 27 percent of the “gay vote” compared to Bush’s … less than 27 percent… I can’t find a straight number on that one. The increase makes sense for a few reasons: McCain did not explicitly exploit the issue — perhaps it’s smuggled in with Palin, and Obama is of the sort to be apt to bring Rick Warren in to do the invocation for his inaugural — which was forewarned during the campaign when Obama participated in that tedious faith based forum — which, at best just sort of thrust Warren into a spot-light past your Jerry Falwells and tapped a small handful of right wing evangelical, or right wing evangelical fellow traveler of sorts, voters into his electoral victory. Obama is acting just as his campaign indicated it would — weren’t you paying attention? As such, why was the gay vote for McCain merely 27? Why not 35 percent?
There was this moment in the vice-presidential debate where Biden and Palin were asked about, in succession, Do you support domestic partnership, Do you support gay marriage. Biden answered to the former with “Yes, (hemming and hawing), and the second with “No, and (a minute of hemming and hawing).” This leaves Palin with the same answers of “Yes, and (a minute of hemming and hawing)” and “No.” It struck me that, tonally, Biden ought to have answered “Yes”, and left it at that for the first answer. This would have provided a difference between the positions of Biden (by extension Obama) and Palin (by extension McCain) — the difference between “Yes” and “Yes (hem and haw).”