It’s too little, too late

Editorial

As the holy days approach and we all consider the things for which we owe atonement, it is a personal, inward-looking time of self-reflection. It is not generally kosher to take it upon oneself to itemize the failures of others or to point out areas where our neighbors have healing to do. But a development this week is so outrageous that we cannot resist. We’ll do our own penitence later.

The story is worthy of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s Fickle Finger of Fate (we date ourselves) and speaks to the cynicism and opportunism of contemporary politics; in this case, American.

Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager of the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign and the first Jewish chair of the Republican National Committee, from 2005-07, acknowledged in the past few days that he is gay.

In his “coming out” interview in The Atlantic magazine, Mehlman said it has “taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life.... Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey and, for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive.” Mehlman continued, “The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”

He’s probably not the only one who wishes he had done so earlier. Say, six years earlier, when he was campaign manager for George W. Bush.

The cynical, socially destructive strategy that the Bush-Cheney campaign used in 2004 was to have decoy organizations put anti-gay marriage propositions on as many ballots in swing states as possible, ensuring a high turnout of red-meat anti-gay voters who, while perhaps disillusioned with Bush after a term of unprecedented controversy, could probably be relied on to pull the lever for the president once drawn to the voting booth to oppose equal marriage.

The strategy, speaking from a strictly tactical position, was brilliant. It worked. It gave Bush another four years as president and gave America, well, four more years of Bush, with all that implies.

Mehlman may not have been the mastermind behind the anti-gay strategy – Karl Rove was the staff member nicknamed “Bush’s brain” – but he was the manager of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Now he is reportedly coming out again – this time in favor of gay marriage and adoption by gay families – the very issues he exploited to win his bosses the 2004 election.

“I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that,” Mehlman said. “It was very hard, personally.”

It was doubtlessly much harder, personally, for the gay American families, especially those with children, who were scapegoated by the Bush-Cheney campaign in what was only one of the most blatant reversals of Bush’s 2000 promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” During the 2004 campaign, the Republicans and their arm’s-length surrogates employed what could arguably be called hate speech and incitement against lesbian and gay Americans and their children. And for what? To win the election. The ideological depth of the commitment to “traditional marriage” was not deep at all. In his second term, Bush made no extraordinary efforts on this front. If anyone should be angry about all this, it is not only gays and lesbians, but the anti-gay marriage voters who were exploited for purely political reasons.

There is a larger lesson to learn here as well. The capability of people to alter course based on perceived self-interest can be startling. Here is a man whose career highlight was re-electing a president by using some of the most exploitive tactics against an identifiable group. Just a few years later, when he finds himself a member of that identifiable group, his ideological commitments shift 180 degrees.

To be kind to Mehlman, society is to blame for forcing people into the closet in the first place. But it is tough to blame society for forcing a man like Mehlman to elbow his way to the top of the political food chain, employ a divisive strategy against a minority group and help re-elect a president whose rhetoric and actions isolate and vilify LGBTQ people.

It is impossible to review this case and not be reminded of the late Roy Cohn, a closet homosexual in a much earlier era, who was the right hand of the notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy. While McCarthy was focused on hunting communists, Cohn, the record suggests, urged the head of the witch-hunt to broaden the net to include homosexuals.

Mehlman may see his promise to advocate for full gay equality as a sort of penitence. And so it may be. If he can use his influence to moderate his party’s position, LGBTQ Americans might see him as a hero of sorts. In the meantime, Mehlman, who after 43 years has realized how self-damaging his deception has been, might now consider the damage he has done to others and seek whatever redemption he might find.

^TOP