Weekend HRC Leadership Summit in DC

Troy and I attended the Human Rights Campaign's annual Leadership Summit in Washington DC the past few days. HRC has two arms – a lobbying arm, which politically advocates for equal rights for LGBT people, and a non-profit Foundation arm, which focuses on education and public awareness. The last several days (Thursday-Sunday) provided an opportunity to hear from a wide range of public figures, journalists, political analysts, and from HRC staff members. It's particularly exciting since we're in the midst of a presidential election race (and the Democrat nominee not decided yet).

People we heard from (in no particular order) include Cathy Hurwitt (Chief of Staff for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky), Steve Elmendorf (Elmendorf Strategies), Diane Feldman (of The Feldman Group), Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite (President of the Chicago Theological Institute), Joe Solmonese (President of HRC), Hillary Rosen, Rick Klein (of ABC's The Note), Andrea Koppel (formerly of CNN), Tobias Wolff (UPenn Constitutional Law professor), Mike Merman (Washington Political Watch), Melissa Regan (filmmaker), Dee Dee Myers (formerly Bill Clinton's Press Secretary), and a ton of HRC policy and program owners.

There are some of the miscellaneous thoughts and points I noted during the meetings:

McCain has benefitted greatly from his deceptive seemingly moderate stand on LGBT issues. For example, he voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have changed the US Constitution to ban marriage. People saw this, and thought that he is a reasonable person. In reality, he voted against this (by his own admission) due to a process issue – he wants marriage to be regulated by the state and not federal government. So while he did vote against this federally (and was crucial to defeating it), he voted in favour of his state's constitutional ban on equal marriage. So all with McCain is not quite as moderate as it may appear on the surface.

While the Republican nominee will definitely be John McCain, the Democrat nomination process is still unfolding and the nominee will either be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Current polling indicates that roughly 30% of all voters who currently support a specific Democratic candidate (either Clinton or Obama) would rather switch and vote for McCain rather than the other Democratic candidate if their preferred candidate did not get the nomination. To put this in perspective, current polls show that 1 in 3 people who support Obama would rather vote a Republican into office than vote Clinton into office (and vice versa). This is terrifying! We had a lot of discussions around how polling can be completely inaccurate when concerning emotional issues, and that while this may be the current state at the moment, once a nominee is settled upon, the number might drop substantially. But it does highlight at least two key items – that people do inaccurately view McCain as "oh, he won't be too bad" and that it is critical for the party to quickly solidify behind a candidate once one is decided upon. The Republicans do that quite effectively – brutal battles during the nomination and then everyone lines up nicely and votes in block once the candidate is selected.

Predictions were solidly that the Democratic nominee would be decided once the last primary is settled in June. News outlets are publicly speculating that the nomination process could go all the way to the Democratic National Convention in August, but everything this weekend was fairly certain once the last primary was voted, one candidate would drop out in order to give the remaining candidate some room to aggressively start campaigning in time for the November general elections. Opinions were also squarely that the Democrats would pick up seats in both the House and the Senate. The big unknowns were by exactly how much, not whether it would happen.

Okay, enough for now. We also saw a few films and had discussions around possible first areas for targeting when a new administration comes into power, social and educational programs HRC is running, and how to get tickets to the DNC convention in Denver. Fodder for more thoughts later..

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