It’s important to learn lessons from the things we do so that we can do better the next time around. There are many lessons the White House can take away from last Wednesday’s announcement about benefits to gay Federal employees. Monday morning quarterbacking is far easier than governing, so this analysis is meant with the intention to help the White House get it right the next time, the time after that, and the time after that and. . . . Get my drift?
Lesson #1: Understand your audience. Amid growing criticism from the LGBT community, quietly spreading the word of a pending ‘major announcement’ in order to quell unrest raises the bar. If you are not going to be able to meet expectations, it’s a bad idea to suggest that you will, especially among a constituency sensitive to being let down. It’s just setting you up for failure and a higher volume of criticism.
Lesson #2: Don’t get blindsided by your own Administration. While it is understandable to be sensitive to the Bush Administration’s over-politicization of the Justice Department, having an overreaction of giving no oversight is a mistake. Doing so sets you up for instances such as the DOJ brief on a lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, where they compared marriage equality to incest, among other things.
That brief became the standard by which next steps were judged. It was a standard the White House could not possibly meet with Wednesday’s announcement and will take some time to make reparations for. Instructing DOJ to run legal briefs by the White House Counsel’s office, if for no other reason than to know what’s in the pipe, would give the White House much-needed knowledge in order to act upon.
Lesson #3: Don’t overstate. Honesty and frankness, while not always popular, will help avoid criticism. Selling something as more than it is invites criticism. Having properly characterized the action being taken from the administration would have prevented certain criticism and also lessened the perception that the announcement was far from meeting expectations.
Lesson #4: Get the messaging right. This episode was wrought with confusing and complicating points. First, the issuance of a Presidential Memorandum instead of an Executive order began a distracting side conversation that immediately began to undermine the announcement.
On further investigation, I found that the Office of Personnel Management is actually changing Federal regulations and has drafted and published them to the Federal Register. That is an accurate portrayal of what happened and would have avoided many of the confusing perceptions in the discussion about it.
Lesson #5: Optics matter. They also need to match the rhetoric and the reality. Part of the anger surrounding this announcement is that the White House was trying to claim credit for more than they were doing. (See Lesson #3.)
Oval Office ceremonies are a big deal; they are often used to sign landmark legislation. While a positive step forward was certainly made with this announcement, it is a small step when compared against the large number of changes that need to be made to erase each instance of discrimination that currently exists in the Federal code of laws.
The event was staged straight out of the ’90s, and, with the changing of the characters, could have been President Clinton signing the executive order banning discrimination in the administration of security clearances. The standard practice to give "official" approval of "the gay community" is to place leaders of gay rights organizations and gay elected officials behind the President. For a President that built the largest grassroots movement in the history of our nation, such a visual is disrespectful at best.
Since the action was most important to Federal employees, a more appropriate venue would have been at OPM addressing those employees about the changes being made. It would have shown that the White House understood those that were affected by the announcement and avoided criticism that it was suggesting the scope was broader than it was.
Lesson #6: Staff matters and hearing what they have to say is critical. There is a perception that the Obama Administration lacks sensitivity to the LGBT community. This can be easily addressed by empowering staff to address this within the White House and to a diversity of people on the outside. This may, and likely does, require that staff abandon traditional thinking about the gay community.
Major changes to both the structure and mindset of the LGBT community have occurred in the past two years. Having staff that not only understand that, but also embody that change will help to ensure that the White House takes them into consideration on future decisions affecting the gay community. Without new perspective, mistakes may continue and that is something the Administration can’t afford to do.
Follow Lane Hudson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tlanehudson
Related posts:
- White House Ratchets Up the Pressure on A-List Gays
- Obama Plan for Same-Sex Partner Benefits Excludes Healthcare
- How to Misread the Lessons of 1994 Health Reform Failure
- This Dumb’s for You: What We Will and Won’t Learn from the Obama-Gates “Teachable Moment”
- John Dean: Is Boies/Olson’s Federal Anti-Prop 8 Filing A Risk?
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While I realize that the White House is all 21st Century and techno savvy and all, with their Blackberries and such, I would suggest that a dead tree copy of this be sent to Rahm (at least) via snail mail. It’s a great listing of all the ways Rahm and the gang fracked up.
Except that’s not what the brief did. That’s what John Aravosis says it did, to the great irritation of ethical lawyers like Chris Geidner:
Agreed, and on a postcard with URL so that it doesn’t waste time in security clearance. Goodness knows Rahm could use this RIGHT NOW.
Heck, fax it to him: 202-456-2461
Rachel Maddown ran with that same meme for awhile…!
This is a distinction pretty much lost on non lawyers. What they actually said was that states had a right to not recognize gay marriages because it was a matter of settled law that they didn’t have to respect marriages that they considered incestuous, even if the laws of the state in which the marriage occurred did not. I believe the example they gave was a man and his niece who were married in Italy where that’s legal.
In plain English that amounts to pretty much the same thing.
There’s plenty of other things in the brief to arouse disgust. For example, saying that it’s a rational position of the federal government to ration scarce resources by not giving survivors benefits to children of gay parents. Then consider their argument that Loving vs Virginia had no bearing what so ever on gay marriage because gay men could marry any women they chose. What particularly roused my ire was the glib statement that DOMA did not arise out of an animus against gay people. What planet do they think we are living on.
I think the next point of focus in Smelt is what the reply brief in support of the motion to dismiss will look like.
Rahm should talk to Nancy Pelosi about the marriage Contract. She comes from San Francisco and could probably get some goons who speek guud English to knock him around a bit. Heh.
This is a cute list of tactical notes, but it naively assumes that the Obama administration means well it just got its messaging wrong. Their intent was to blow off the gay community in an attempt to position themselves to the “center” and preserve some kind of political capital they imagine is finite and have to use for more important things. They know damn well what they are doing. Your advice is for a fantasy administration that doesn’t exist.
The Obama administration’s DOJ did not just file a brief supporting DOMA, but also, unconscionably, also issued one supporting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
I was as ardent an Obama supporter as any, during the campaign. But, after learning he has no immediate intention of preventing gays to be booted under DADT (he could, at the very least, issue a stop-loss order, while the matter gets debated). I wash my hands of him.
There is only one thing that would get me behind Obama again, and that would be concrete action on GLBT issues of consequence. His words mean nothing. They are hollow.
I won’t hold my breath.
By the way…kidcharles analysis is exactly right, imho. I think this was Rahm Emanuel’s strategy all along. Throw the gays under the bus to prove how centrist Obama is…figuring who would we turn to?
They act like the rest of the progressive alliance won’t be offended, as well. Unfortunately for the Obama team, there have been too many instances of right-wing pandering for this strategy to fly.
If I were a betting man, I would say that this beginning groundswell may eventually conjure the memories of another groundbreaking moment in glbt civil rights, the Stonewall Riots of 1969. While this may not be as big or significant as that event, I think it would be wrong to undere-stimate the current level of rage bubbling below the surface in the glbt community. It started with Prop 8 and has been fueled by Obama’s broken promises.
A new wave of activism has arisen that hasn’t been seen in this community for a long, long time.
Cocktail parties for access, and conducting business as usual, just won’t cut it anymore.
The answer to bigoted briefs coming out of DoJ is not to run everything by the White House. The DOJ is supposed to be independent, which means that we should be giving Eric Holder a hell of a lot more shit. It’s Holder’s DOJ that’s defending every awful Bush abuse and filing bigoted briefs. That doesn’t mean that Obama doesn’t deserve some blame, but the way to fix this is not by politicizing the DoJ.
We know that Little Miss Liberty University burrowed lots of wingnuts in career DoJ positions. But they still have to take orders, and the order should come down that bigotry is out and the Constitution is in.