The climate change community had two big weeks in a row starting with Hillary Clinton finally coming out
against the Keystone XL pipeline and then Shell Oil
announcing that it would cease and desist drilling in the Arctic. They were both hard-fought wins. One proved that the pounding paddles of hundreds of "
kayaktivists" can actually make a hundred-billion-dollar company blink and the other was yet another reminder that Democratic politicians often have to be backed into a corner before they do the right thing.
Hillary’s Keystone pronouncement came after she was asked a simple “yes” or “no” question by Drake University student Clio Cullison: Did she support construction of Keystone XL? Clinton responded in kind. “I oppose it,” she said, adding that she now felt she had a “responsibility” to tell voters. But it was a long time in coming, starting five years ago this month when she first said she was “inclined” to approve the project while still serving as secretary of state.
So why now? There’s any number of theories out there, ranging from oil prices dropping so low that the project’s no longer profitable anyway to suspicions that the Obama administration has now decided it will reject it (no word on that, btw). But here’s the most important reason: activists finally proved there was a much bigger downside to not rejecting Keystone XL than there was to rejecting it. As one aide put it the day of Clinton's announcement:
A Clinton campaign aide told CNN that the former secretary of state couldn't wait any longer to explain her position.
"She's been taking on water for (not taking a position) ... She didn't want to jam Secretary Kerry or jam the President but it was just time. It's September," the aide said.
"Taking on water"—in other words, bailing out her non-stance had finally become way more trouble than it was worth.
It’s the same way DREAM activists got Clinton to take such a bold position on immigration during the first several weeks of her candidacy. She didn’t just say she would expand on President Obama’s executive actions out of the goodness of her heart. She was badgered repeatedly by Dreamers asking her position on Obama’s executive actions while she campaigned for Democrats around the country during the 2014 midterms.
Head below the fold for more on Clinton.
That put her and her campaign team on notice: This isn’t going away. And lo and behold, Clinton came out very aggressively on immigration within the first several weeks of her candidacy.
That very public “we’re gonna get in your face” approach is the polar opposite tack of what we have seen thus far from the LGBT movement. Clinton has not been hounded by activist questions about her commitment to passing LGBT civil rights legislation and how she plans to do that. And until today, that inaction had yielded nothing more than a couple supportive tweets about the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling and the new LGBT civil rights bill.
Fortunately, the LGBT movement got an assist this weekend from Vice President Joe Biden, who is both delivering the keynote speech at the Human Rights Campaign gala tonight and threatening Clinton's status as the Democratic establishment's presidential candidate of choice. So when Clinton attended a Human Rights Campaign meeting earlier today, she made her most forceful comments yet on LGBT rights to a room of about 800 attendees.
"I’ve been fighting alongside you and others for equal rights and I’m just getting warmed up," said Clinton. "That’s a promise, from one HRC to another."
The contest for the votes and support of the LGBT community may be, at least for now, proving to be as motivating a force for spurring campaign promises as a it was in 2008. But in order for a Democratic president to prioritize LGBT issues once in office, she or he will need to feel the heat of activism we are currently seeing from other progressive movements.
The fact that LGBT activists have mostly been MIA on the campaign trail does not bode well for LGBT issues moving forward. In fact, the movement that many immigration and climate change activists took inspiration from during the early part of Obama’s presidency has now got it backward, letting Washington-based groups do its bidding without the input and urgency of grassroots activists.
Having covered Obama's first term as a reporter and written a book about the time period that's being released next week, I can tell you that, left to their own devices, Hillary Clinton and the Human Rights Campaign will not push the envelope on finishing the job of equalizing treatment for LGBT Americans. Both entities will need to be pushed to move further and faster than makes them comfortable if we want any hope of providing full protections for LGBT Americans any time within the next decade. Washington advocates and HRC’s Chad Griffin have already promised that it’s going to “take a long time”—maybe even as long as a decade.