Hillary Jumps From the Coffin

With all the media and much of the blogosphere decidedly turning against her cold and uninspiring machine, as late as 8:30pm ET on Tuesday they were still saying New Hampshire would be a blowout for Barack Obama.

The size of the crowds across the Granite State for the Illinois insurgent was unmistakable, and the fervent energy was in clear evidence. When word came of an historic increase in voter turnout overall, it seemed automatically to favor him. And the exit polls seemed to be the nail in Hillary's coffin: Obama 35, Clinton 30.

And then she leaped out of the coffin, gasped a gigantic breath, and won the New Hampshire primary last night.

And I, too, gasped when I saw the raw vote totals, saw the trend myself and realized how wrong everyone was, me included. Perhaps it was the hope that the old way would indeed get the rejection that it's due and the call to dump the machine approach to politics would win the day in scrappy New Hampshire. I was elated that John McCain -- the man I fervently backed in the New Hampshire primary in 2000 -- sailed to victory against the wooden, lying, reprehensible Mitt Romney. And I love how Rudy Giuliani is lurking out there, waiting to try and show that the South Carolina Christian Right clown circus matters so much less than it used to.

But I have to admit that my heart was in seeing Barack Obama kick Hillary Clinton's ass last night. Not because I particularly care about who the Democrats nominate. But because the showdown between these two gigantic figures in American politics is truly a proxy fight for the soul of the gay political movement.

And not just a battle between David Geffen and Hilary Rosen. Not even a battle between two parts of the gay Democratic world. It's a fight between a wide open, inspiring movement based on winning arguments by winning over our opponents - and a movement of shameless hacks who have no ideas, no vision and no loyalty to anything but power.

A fight between a movement typified by the slavishly pro-Clinton Human Rights Campaign -- which I've already called the most useless civil rights organization to ever own a building in the District of Columbia -- and one which could find its voice anew with gay Democrats, independents and even some fairly prominent gay Republicans joining forces to say ideas matter more than the eternal, frustrating and pointless game of chinese checkers that gay politics has become.

Obama may not have actually ended up being the right leader for such a movement. (I say this despite the fact that his concession speech was just as electrifying to watch as his victory speech in Iowa.) Indeed, Obama might leave the stage before the end of the month. But the energy around his sweeping campaign was the same kind of energy that bristles in so many concerned and engaged gay and lesbian Americans today, many of them veteran activists from all political stripes. Me included. We are so incredibly sick of the garbage that both HRCs just shovel out at us day after day -- the droning, meaningless bullet points and the clanking, over-packaged gloss -- with a kind of disrespect and arrogance that is so insular, so cold and so selfish that it is almost nauseating. It's frankly what turned me to Log Cabinism in the late 1980's, and keeps me far from gay activism today. HRC leads a self-sustaining movement simply by how much oxygen it sucks out of everyone else - nothing more.

But alas, Senator HRC's machine cranked out two essential tactical moves -- a negative mailer on Obama and abortion that worked with women voters, and faux tears before the cameras in Portsmouth, designed to telegraph that there is a human being somewhere underneath the circuitry. Her tactics won the day. (No sign of an actual idea or vision on the horizon.)

Watching Hillary's victory speech was chilling. There was elation at the start on her face, and in that room, that you could feel in your bones as a spectator, and that nascent hope that you'd be seeing something memorable in just a moment. This was, after all, a gigantic comeback for her campaign, and for her personally. And then her speech began. The teenagers piled up behind her immediately started looking away and chattering, and Hillary was back to her droning, bulleted, crashingly dull self. (Indeed - the shiver-moment: the teens wake up at hearing themselves mentioned and stupidly cheer with glee at Hillary's dead-panned line about "young people who can't afford to go to college and pursue their dreams.").

Vindicated, and back to work being Hillary -- right down to the expressions of thanks to her daughter, husband and mother that were about as full of human warmth as office stationery.

Meanwhile, the other HRC and the world it represents, will simply get up today, turn itself on, boot up and go back to its empty clicking and whirring. No lessons. I mean, they fumbled ENDA and hate crimes, shifting and changing their positions even more shamelessly than Mitt Romney, and have nothing to show for more than a year of Democratic rule in Congress. Why should they draw any lessons from their beloved Hillary Clinton's amazing scare? The Clinton machine won -- the unions, seniors, lower income voters, and a negative mailer to scare women. Message: machines win, and it's all about tactics.

So for those of us left to wonder when this showdown can actually have its day, I'll quote perhaps Obama's best gaffe of the weekend: "The time for come has changed."