Blame Game Emerges Over Role of Gay Marriage in Democrats’ Loss

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The New York Sun

A quarrel has broken out among Democrats about which of two major milestones in the battle over same-sex marriage did more damage to Senator Kerry’s presidential bid.


In an interview, Rep. Barney Frank said he believes the decision by the San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in February prompted more ire than the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision last November allowing gay marriages in that state.


“It confirms my view that the mayor of San Francisco did us a lot more harm than good by announcing he was going to perform the marriages even without the sanction of the courts,” said Mr. Frank, an openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts.


Mr. Frank said concerns about gun control and abortion probably hurt Mr. Kerry more than gay marriage, but the marriage issue “clearly had some negative effect in some states.” The congressman said San Francisco’s move, and copycat actions in New York and Oregon, increased the fear of Americans wary of the practice.


“It created the sense that it was happening everywhere all at once without any kind of public process,” Mr. Frank said. “I predicted it before, and said that if Democrats lost, some people are going to blame us.”


At a press conference on Wednesday, Mr. Newsom suggested the high court in Massachusetts was more to blame.


“If you listened to the president, in his own words, it was the ‘activist judges’ who had the audacity to interpret the Constitution appropriately and say it’s wrong to deny equal protection to all people,” the mayor said. “Maybe all those activist judges may have had a little to do with it and a little less to do with us in San Francisco.”


Mr. Newsom also suggested that California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the release of a new videotape from Osama bin Laden may have had a greater role in President Bush’s victory and Mr. Kerry’s defeat.


“I’d like to think I’m that influential. I hardly think I was,” the mayor said.


Mr. Frank didn’t buy that explanation. “That’s compounding the error with evasion of responsibility,” he said. On Tuesday, voters in 11 states approved bans on gay marriage, usually by overwhelming margins. The congressman said many of these efforts were triggered not by the Massachusetts court ruling, but by Mr. Newsom’s decision and the widely televised scenes that followed.


Mr. Frank noted that thousands of couples have been married in Massachusetts and their marriages remain valid, while those “married” in San Francisco have seen their unions declared invalid by the courts.


“We got the political hit for zero gain,” he said. “Many of those couples are bitterly disappointed.”


As Democrats continued to debate the party’s losses at the polls Tuesday, some were on the defensive because their predictions about the electorate seemed to be far from the mark.


“I don’t quite know what happened,” a Democratic political analyst, Ruy Teixeira, said. Mr. Teixeira is co-author of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” a book that argues that Democrats are becoming dominant because of demographic trends in America. Hispanics are one of the groups that was expected to boost the Democrats, but exit polls indicate that Mr. Bush did nine percentage points better with them this year than he did in 2000. “This was one of the real surprises to me,” Mr. Teixeira said.


Mr. Teixeira stressed that his book is a description of the Democrats’ prospects in the long term. “We never intended our analysis to mean that Democrats would win any particular election. Certainly, we did not predict this one,” he said.


In an August issue of the New Republic, Mr. Teixeira and co-author John Judis wrote an article entitled, “White Flight: Bush Loses His Base.” Exit polls show Mr. Bush was preferred by 56% of white voters and a whopping 70% of Protestants who attend church each week.


Mr. Teixeira blamed Mr. Kerry and his campaign for failing to capitalize on the doubts many people had about Mr. Bush’s policies.


“I don’t think these voters very particularly liked what John Kerry stood for,” the analyst said. “The opportunity was there to make headway with these kinds of voters. Kerry wasn’t the candidate.”


While Senator Clinton is one of the most obvious contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2008, Mr. Teixeira said he doesn’t think she can coax white voters in the South and Midwest back into the Democratic fold.


“I like Senator Clinton,” he said. “I don’t see Hillary Clinton as being the candidate who can bring these folks back.”


Some Democrats have also called for the party to move to the political center by readjusting its policy positions, but Mr. Frank warned that would be a mistake.


“The center is not a coherent set of issues,” the congressman said “You’re not in politics to win. You’re in politics to advance public policy you believe in.”


The New York Sun

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