Hillary Clinton @ Gay Pride?

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Here’s a question: Will Hillary Clinton march in the New York City gay pride parade in a few weeks?

She’s marched in all the other NYC gay pride parades since she became Senator from New York (I took this picture of her from our apartment window two years ago). Except for last year. Last year she was too busy running for president, and marching in New York City’s gay pride parade probably didn’t seem like the best way to appeal to a national voter base.

But now she doesn’t have to deal with that anymore. So I wonder if she’ll march. She’d probably have a ginormous crowd.

Dem Primary Summary Chart

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Here’s a great chart summarizing Obama’s delegate lead over five months of voting, including reminders of the various events over the past five months, as well as a U.S. map showing where Obama and Clinton each won popular votes. The Times often puts together neat charts like this that manage to pack a whole lot of information into one image.

CA Denies Stay in Marriage Ruling

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The California Supreme Court today has denied a request to delay same-sex marriage until after the November elections. Same-sex marriage becomes legal in California on June 16 at 5:00 p.m. This is great news.

The anti-gay folks had wanted the court to hold off on legalizing same-sex marriage until California voters had a chance to vote on the constitutional amendment in November, saying that it could cause confusion if same-sex couples got married and then a constitutional amendment banned those marriages. The court denied the request, unanimously, with a simple order. [Update: Originally I had thought it was 4-3, but that was only on the request for rehearing. The decision to deny the stay was unanimous.]

The court didn’t provide its reasons, but here’s one: getting a constitutional amendment on the California ballot requires the signatures of just 8% of the voters. If the court granted a stay pending the outcome of a constitutional amendment initiative, what’s to say that any group that disagrees with a court decision can’t get 8% of the voters to sign a petition for an initiative overturning the decision, and then request a stay? Granted, the current situation is unusual, because the signatures have already been gathered. But if you can just delay implementation of any court decision by saying, “Hey wait – we’re about to try to overturn your decision via ballot, can you wait a few months?” that doesn’t seem fair.

Also, what if the court granted a stay and the amendment then failed? Then same-sex couples would have lost several months in which they could have been married, all because they were held hostage to 8% of the voters who signed a petition. That doesn’t seem fair either. I’m glad the court seemed to agree.

Over the next few months, gay couples will get married in California, and Californians will see that the world hasn’t fallen apart.

Hilary Rosen on HRC

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Hilary Rosen in HuffPost:

I am disappointed. As a long time Hillary Clinton supporter and more importantly, an admirer, I am sad that this historic effort has ended with such a narrow loss for her.

[ ]

I am also so very disappointed at how she has handled this last week.

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She had an opportunity to soar and unite. She had a chance to surprise her party and the nation after the day-long denials about expecting any concession and send Obama off on the campaign trail of the general election with the best possible platform. I wrote before how she had a chance for her “Al Gore moment.” And if she had done so, the whole country ALL would be talking today about how great she is and give her her due.

Instead she left her supporters empty, Obama’s angry, and party leaders trashing her. She said she was stepping back to think about her options. She is waiting to figure out how she would “use” her 18 million voters.

But not my vote. I will enthusiastically support Barack Obama’s campaign. Because I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.

Tomasky on HRC

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Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian about Clinton’s speech:

She held a rhetorical knife to Obama’s throat and said, in not so many words: I’m still calling some shots, buddy. You offer me the vice-presidency, or I walk away. But she has also forced Obama into a situation whereby if he chooses her now, he looks weak. So that’s the choice she is hoping to impose on the nominee: don’t choose me, and Bill and I will subtly work to see that you lose; choose me, and look like a weakling who can’t lead the party without the Clintons after all. Now that’s putting the interests of the party first, isn’t it?

Clinton’s Speech

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This, to me, was the most telling line of Clinton’s speech last night:

And I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard, and no longer to be invisible.

This is what it’s always been about for her. Respect. She feels like she’s been wronged, and that those who voted for her have been wronged, merely because somebody else won.

A desire to be respected is a desire grounded in insecurity. But respect isn’t something other people can give you. It’s something you have to give yourself.

Apparently the contest for her hasn’t been about getting a Democrat into the White House. It’s been about respect. She’s decided to ruin the party over… hurt feelings.

But feeding the fire of the people who didn’t vote for your party’s nominee, feeding their anger and insecurity, is really unprofessional, not to mention potentially destructive.

I will be making no decisions tonight.

How delusional are you? Don’t you get it? The decision is not yours to make. It’s already been made. You are not going to be the nominee. Your voters are not delegates that you control and can “release” to your opponent. They’re people with independent minds, and you can’t tell them what to do. And by the way — Obama already has the delegates. That’s what last night was about, in case you missed it.

Obama does not need to appoint you as his running mate, or promise to do anything for you. He’s the nominee. There’s no such thing as a co-presidency. The framers of the constitution thought about an executive council, but they decided to invest the executive power in a single individual.

The only choices you do have are whether to campaign for Obama, which, if you truly care about the issues more than you care about yourself, you will do enthusiastically; or to make an independent run, hoping to throw the election into the House and destroying the Democratic Party in the process.

But stop laboring under the delusion that you have any power left in this situation.

It’s not about you, Hillary. If you truly have any self-respect, you’ll realize this.

One Good Thing

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There’s one good thing that has come out of the prolonged Obama-Clinton race.

There seems to be a big chunk of Clinton voters who say they’re dead-set against voting for Obama. They’ll vote for McCain before they vote for Obama. Basically, their order of preference was: (1) Clinton, (2) McCain, (3) Obama.

The thing is, had Clinton not stayed in the race, we’d never know who these people are. Those Clinton voters who say they’ll never vote for Obama would have been indistinguishable from voters who would vote for John McCain over any Democrat whatsoever.

But because Clinton stayed in the race, we know who they are. We know they’re receptive to Democratic arguments, since they voted for Clinton. It will be easier to convince them to vote Democratic than it will be to convince die-hard Republicans to do so. Just convince them that Obama holds the same positions on the issues that Clinton does.

It may or may not work, depending on whether you see Clinton as the centrist and Obama as the liberal (Clinton and guns, Obama and his bad bowling), or Obama as the centrist and Clinton as the liberal (see universal health care). But it’s a thought.

The Obama Upset

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Chris Cillizza writes about the remarkable nature of Obama’s impending nomination victory:

The facts are thus: Clinton came into the nomination fight heavily favored to be the nominee. Not only did she have the backing of the most potential political machine in the country — due in large part to her husband’s eight years in the White House — but she had also built a vaunted fundraising operation of her own and surrounded herself with some of the best and brightest aides in Democratic politics.

Obama, on the other hand, had served for two years in the U.S. Senate after doing a stint in the Illinois state Senate. He has toured the country for Democratic candidates during the 2006 election cycle and had begun to build a national organization through his Hopefund political action committee. (In fact, Obama often referred to himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name.”)

There seems little dispute that Obama over Clinton deserves a place in the conversation of great political upsets.

Whether it makes you happy or sad, it’s pretty amazing. Clinton was supposed to be the nominee. People had talked about it for years. She was the wife of a popular two-term Democratic ex-president, and she had money and loyalty. The Clinton machine was intimidatingly unbeatable.

And then Obama happened.

Despite the talk of racism hurting Obama among whites, there’s a good argument for the notion that his race helped him as much as his hurt him.

[E]very four years, the candidate who is the new politics, new left darling, whether it’s Howard Dean or whether it’s Bill Bradley or whether it’s Gene McCarthy, has historically fallen on the shoals of the white working-class vote… And that candidate would always make a big splash early in the contest and there would be a lot of media attention… [but] ultimately what would happen is working-class whites and working-class nonwhites would align behind another candidate. …

[I]f you think of the Democratic Party as working-class whites, working-class blacks… and then the elite class, whatever that is, the cappuccino, latte class… and trichotomize the Democratic Party coalition as those three things, if you can get two of the three you’re probably going to be the nominee.

If you see Obama as a black Bill Bradley or Howard Dean, then the reason he did so well is that in addition to the “elite”-type voters, he also got the black voters — unlike Bradley or Dean, who only got the “elites,” while the more mainstream candidate got everyone else. The argument is basically that if Obama had been white, he would have gone the way of his “new politics” predecessors and faded away. Also, by this argument, a large chunk of the white population voted against him not because he’s black, but because he’s the “elitist” candidate. Just as they supposedly wouldn’t support Bradley or Dean, they wouldn’t support Obama, either.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t racism going on as well. Or at least some sort of quasi-xenophobia. As David Brooks writes today:

These independent voters were intrigued by Obama’s “change” message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. It’s as if they can’t hang Obama’s life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction.

Basically, Obama is just too weird an idea for some people.

Now that he’ll be able to run a race without one hand tied behind his back, he needs to spend some time focusing on his personal narrative.

And Clinton needs to campaign full-steam for him so we can get a Democrat back in the White House. She needs to hammer away at McCain and convince her supporters that she does *not* want them to vote for him. Whether she can do this, I don’t know. But unless she wants McCain to get elected and appoint a couple more Supreme Court justices, she’d damn well better work her ass off for the ticket.

Courthouse Square

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More on Courthouse Square, destroyed by fire yesterday at Universal Studios:

It was where Robert Zemeckis shot the electrifying clock-tower climax with Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.” It was also the courthouse backdrop for Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” …

Fans of the old television series “Leave It to Beaver” may recognize the courthouse facade as where the Beav went to school.

And before it was called Courthouse Square, thanks to its use in the “Back to the Future” movies, the area was known as Mockingbird Square because of its extensive use in the 1962 adaptation of the Harper Lee novel.

The Hill Valley clock tower was added to the courthouse for “Back to the Future,” but over the years, filmmakers have removed the clock and redressed the buildings for several films, including Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” plus “Bruce Almighty” and “The Cat in the Hat.” It was also used in the 1960s musicals “Bye Bye Birdie” (it was where pop star Conrad Birdie performed to his adoring female fans) and “The Music Man” (as the locale of the “76 Trombones” parade finale).

Courthouse Square was one of the standing sets of the current CBS paranormal drama “Ghost Whisperer.”

Gay Marriage Letter

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This letter in the Times almost made me cry.

Governor Paterson will have a place in our hearts all of our lives. We have been married for 36 years and are blessed with four children. Our youngest, Jacob, happens to be gay. Three of them were married in the last couple of years. It has been a time of great joy for our family as they wed the love of their lives.

When our oldest son, Benjamin, got married, he asked Jacob to be his best man. Then our son Joshua got married and again Jacob was his best man. When our daughter, Britta, married her dear Matthew, she didn’t have a maid of honor. She had a man of honor, and it was her brother Jacob.

At each wedding, as Jacob stood by his siblings and signed the papers to make it legal, he did it knowing he did not have the right to marriage himself.

As a mom, I find that hard to understand and heartbreaking to know it is true. How can this country treat people in such a way that something as basic as finding love and being married can be denied to a whole segment of society?

We will do all that it takes to make sure our dear son Jacob can marry the love of his life. But right now, I want to send our love to Governor Paterson. He makes me want to move to New York!

Randi Reitan
Eden Prairie, Minn., May 30, 2008

Presumably her son is this Jacob Reitan.

Charlie Savage to NY Times

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Charlie Savage is a hero of mine. Savage, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting in the Boston Globe on the hidden workings of the Bush administration, wrote last year’s Takeover, about how Dick Cheney has worked for over 30 years to eviscerate the system of governmental checks and balances and concentrate power in the executive branch.

Well, it turns out Savage has left the Boston Globe and joined the New York Times. I saw his byline on an article this morning and did a double take. I looked him up, and sure enough, he just started there. (This is his first Times article.) Awesome.

Big loss for the Globe, though.

Paterson’s Marriage Decision II

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Richard E. Barnes, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said yesterday in response to Governor Paterson’s new policy interpretation recognizing out-of-state same-sex marriages:

“No single politician or court or legislature should attempt to redefine the very building block of our society in a way that alters its entire meaning and purpose.”

He doesn’t seem to understand that the “entire meaning and purpose” of marriage has been altered many times over the years — over centuries, in fact — and that this is not because of a “single politician or court or legislature,” but because of the evolution of society. Marriage is no longer about the joining of two families for economic benefit; it’s no longer about dowries and the subsuming of a woman’s legal identity into that of a man; it’s no longer about the survival of your tribe. For some people it’s not even about having children. Marriage can be about having children, and raising a family, and it usually is. But not always. It can be about happiness and personal stability. It can be about economic benefits. People get married for all sorts of reasons today, and liberalized divorce laws attest to how much society’s definition of marriage has changed over the years.

Seriously, I wish some of these people would do some actual thinking sometimes, before or instead of running their mouths.

Also from the Times today on the governor’s decision: how the governor came to support gay rights early in his career, how same-sex marriage opponents face an uphill battle in challenging the decision, and an editorial on how this is a step closer to justice.

I Me My

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The Emily Gould essay has got me thinking deeply about first-person writing, and it’s made me very self-conscious about it. The closest metaphor I can come up with is, if you loved ice cream, and then you watched someone binge on ice cream until they got sick, and it made you never, ever want to eat ice cream again. I almost never again want to blog the words I, me, or my, even though I’ve done it many times in this paragraph.

I think most of our brains have a gate between the part that thinks and the part that thinks about our thinking. Most of us mostly live in the part that thinks. But my brain’s gate has always been permeable. Years of therapy have helped break that gate down, although I was like this even before therapy. I am often too aware of my thinking, to the point where my thoughts pile up and trip over each other, and I can’t articulate anything because while I’m formulating the words, new thoughts are already forming about what I’m saying. I form counterarguments almost as soon as I form arguments, preemptively judging myself and my arguments so nobody else does it first. I’d rather hit myself with the bludgeon than let someone else do it.

That’s one of my problems — I often think there’s someone with a bludgeon when there isn’t.

So my thinking gets very self-referential and I start to feel like I’m living in a schematic drawing of my life instead of just living. There are other people like this. I used to think it was just me.

A person cannot make a living writing these days. I’m trying to realize that. I’ve long known it. But it’s even more true today, when anyone can have a blog and share their thoughts about anything — their life, politics, culture. The barrier is lower than it ever was. Unfortunately, writing is something I love to do. The only thing I love to do as much as writing is learning. And you can’t make a living learning.

There are people out there who are content not to be ambitious. They’re happy with their lives. They don’t have grand expectations. I wish I were like that.

But wishing is futile. Perhaps there’s a way that I can be like that. I don’t know if there is, but maybe.