NO ONE WILL EVEN NOTICE SISTER BOOM-BOOM:

DNC wary of gay marriage issue: Stance sought to limit impact on convention (Rick Klein, 12/4/2003, Boston Globe)

National Democrats planning to launch their presidential nominee from the home state of the historic gay marriage decision either want to recast the issue as one of basic civil rights or to ignore gay marriage entirely during next summer's convention.

In interviews this week, top Democrats were struggling with how to handle the gay marriage decision at next year's convention, with the party's chairman saying he would like to avoid what he called "wedge issues" and to remain focused on the Democrats' traditional message of the economy, jobs, and health care.

"This convention will not be about those issues. It's not going to happen," Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe told the Globe yesterday. "George Bush wants us to talk about those other issues, because he can't talk about jobs, he can't talk about health care, he can't talk about education. This election is not going to be about these wedge issues that the Republicans and George Bush want us to talk about." [...]

The court decision from the state that is hosting the convention could make it easier for Republicans to paint the eventual nominee as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal. As the home of US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and former governor Michael S. Dukakis, that was going to be an issue anyway; shortly after Boston won the convention last year, retiring House Republican leader Dick Armey quipped, "If I were a Democrat, I suspect I would feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, in America."

It's really amazing watching the Democrats morph into the post-Depression Republicans. From 1932 to 1976, Republicans--with rare exceptions like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater--were terrified of being associated with conservative ideas. It was believed, perhaps correctly given what became of Taft and Goldwater, that such notions were so far beyond the mainstream as to make their mere mention suicidal. It was only with Ronald Reagan's near successful primary campaign against Gerald Ford that the Party returned to its philosophical core and it took another twenty-plus years after that for it to become the predominant political philosophy again. The question for Democrats then is whether, just as the GOP was willing to settle for a Nixon in order to win, they are willing to settle for the occassional Clinton. In retrospect, it seems to have hardly been worth it for either party in those specific cases. So do you boldly run on what you actually believe, or do you do things like shove gays back in the closet and hope no one hears the rattling?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2003 1:22 PM