LGBT Leadership Town Hall: Why Was HRC’s Joe Solmonese So Supportive Of Obama’s Performance?
Remember, you can listen to a rebroadcast in full this weekend (schedule here.) If you’re not a Sirius subscriber, think about signing up — Mike is great! But you can get a free pass at the site if you want to try it out first.
Now, I want to share the next segment, comments made by National Gay & Lesbian Task Force executive director Rea Carey, Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese, and blogger and activist Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend. After you read them, I’ll share my thoughts. The question was a bit broad ranging, but had to do with where we are right now, in relation to progress on LGBT issues, and the White House, from the moment Obama took office.
Rea Carey:
Some of these things [we’ve accomplished] are not sexy. They’re not going to make headlines. So we have to force them to make the headlines.
It’s as if during the previous eight years, someone went through the entire federal government and unplugged every lamp that had anything to do with money going to our community, attention to young people, to seniors, anything that would benefit LGBT people, and they shoved them in closets.
She went on to say that there’s been a lot of work by a coalition of twenty LGBT organizations to work their way back, and to communicate our needs and our stories to decision-makers in government.
Joe Solmonese:
This administration has appointed the highest-ranking openly gay person of any administration in history in John Berry as head of the OPM, and the greatest number of openly-LGBT people, moreso than any previous administration.
When we talk about these things, like DOMA, and ENDA, and Uniting American Families, and the big landmark legislation, that is not something that sits solely with the president. You can’t evaluate the president’s performance on the idea the we ought to have overturned DOMA at this point, without considering the fact that you’ve got to look at the fact of where we are in the House and Senate on those things.
Pam Spaulding:
I expect that the [LGBT activist] groups working at the federal level are going to see the importance of getting ENDA done, getting these things done. And when you see the behavior that has been exhibited during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which, it seems like that repeal should have been a lot easier than it has been, I wonder when I see lots of my readers saying, ‘Why aren’t they all working together and holding a press conference?’ ‘Why can’t they do joint activities that show the level of urgency?’
While listening to the Town Hall, I gained a tremendous amount of respect for NGLTF’s Rea Carey. She has credibility and intimate knowledge of details. Pam Spaulding said the exact same thing I said a year ago in May, 2009, in my piece, “The Big Tent,” when I asked, “How do you feel our leaders are serving us?” and, when are they going to start working together? and then later, when I wrote in “LGBTQ Leadership: Going The Way Of America’s Automakers,” that our LGBT activist groups are like the American automakers,
…old, outdated, ineffective, over-lapping behemoths whose lack of achievement demand they either declare bankruptcy, then refocus on their core competencies and truly re-create themselves, or turn over the wheel to the new leaders of our community: national grassroots organizations like Join the Impact, and local ones, like Mass Equality, Equality Maine, and One Iowa.
In my previous post I mentioned how HRC’s Joe Solmonese was really the “punching bag” of the day. Do you see why?
Why is it at every turn, Solmonese makes a concerted effort to bend over backwards and applaud Obama for things like appointing “the highest-ranking openly gay person of any administration in history,” (which is nice, but doesn’t stop DADT discharges or let me marry.) Joe’s own letter to Obama a year ago June, while firm, has certainly not delivered any results.) Why is Solmonese working so hard to defend Obama’s performance?
Here’s a little fact I learned during my twenty-five years in business. Think about your own experience and you’ll recognize its truth: Poor performers stick together. Excellent performers stick together. Not all the time, but look around your workplace, or think about life in college or high school.
Those who are doing a great job surround themselves with others who do a great job. Solmonese’s adamant, uncritical, unwavering support of Obama on LGBT issue performance — which is where they both are weak — is becoming, well, let’s call it uncomfortable.
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
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