There are few politicians who've been more outspoken on LGBT rights in a gut-level, passionate way than Vice President Joe Biden. Nor has there been any politician so public in his or her opinions and so close to a president who catapulted LGBT rights during his two terms, profoundly making history. Political strategists still debate whether Biden forced President Obama to move more quickly on marriage equality -- something Biden surely would like us to believe -- or if he was part of a trial balloon days before the president finally announced support in the spring of 2012 (most reports point to the former). But the bottom line is Biden was first, ahead of Obama and Hillary Clinton -- who was last out of the gate among the three.
And that may present a problem for Clinton -- who some recent reports suggest has wide support among LGBT voters -- if Biden jumps in the race, in the same way we saw support from LGBT activists begin to cleave between Clinton and Obama during the 2008 primaries. The LGBT electorate is not a big one. But it is a politically active, organized and influential one, raising a lot of money for candidates and, like other minority groups focused on attaining rights, providing worker bees during campaigns who galvanize and energize the larger electorate -- and in the case of LGBT organizers, that's had a big impact on energizing younger voters too.
In 2012, Biden also said transgender rights are "the civil rights issue our time," ahead of Clinton's discussion of the issue, which, to her credit, she has taken up, as she also has, finally, come out for an all-inclusive LGBT civil rights bill in recent weeks (in a tweet). She also brings up the issues a bit more in her speeches now. What's lacking with Clinton is a passion that gets to the much-discussed "authenticity" criticism about her. It's something to which I've not really given a lot of credence in the past, and have mostly thought it was overblown: different people have different styles and different ways of connecting. But on this issue of LGBT civil rights, when comparing Clinton to Biden, it's definitely there.
Whereas Biden was so moved by the plight of gay couples that he seemingly blurted out his support in an emotional interview response --ahead of his president -- Clinton came out for marriage equality a year after the president, long after she departed the administration and after most other Democrats in Congress, in a carefully orchestrated video she made for the gay lobbying group, the Human Rights Campaign, which the group released. Spontaneous and warm, it was not. Every statement from Clinton on LGBT rights since has seemed to be just as calibrated: A seemingly parsed tweet here, a strategic few sentences or a well-placed photo there. We just don't get the full-throttled, frank embrace that we get from Joe. In fact, the few times Hillary has spoken more frankly on the issue, she's been awkward, defensive and uncomfortable, as was evidenced in the interview on NPR in 2014 with Terry Gross in which she stumbled on the question of her evolution.
Rather than encourage her to speak boldly on the issues to draw people in, it appears like the campaign has gone the safer route of enlisting a cadre of supporters to create a drumbeat in which Hillary Clinton is held up as some sort of icon to gays who will simply get LGBT support by default.
"We get her like we get our mom," said Fred Sainz, then of the Human Rights Campaign, to The New York Times, in a statement that many felt was insulting to LGBT voters, Hillary Clinton and all female politicians at once. Paul Schindler, editor of the New York bi-weekly newspaper Gay City News called it "cringe-worthy." Other supporters have pushed the stereotypical idea that Clinton is similar to the many strong Hollywood and pop culture women gay men have iconized, comparing her to Judy Garland, Liza Minelli and others.
"She is a cultural icon in a way that a number of other women known by only one name are," Seth Bringman, who worked on Clinton's 2008 campaign and served as communications director for the Ready for Hillary super PAC, told MSNBC.com's Alex Seitz-Wald. "Hillary is the Madonna or the Cher to a younger generation of gay guys across the country. They see a part of themselves in her."
That kind of rhetoric is counter-productive in the long-run. Hillary Clinton is not your mom. She's a politician who should be expressing specifics on our issues -- something which will increasingly be demanded of her -- and held to the same standard as any other politician (unlike your mom). Nor is her appeal something that should be likened to entertainers like Cher or Madonna (two women who, by the way, are risk-takers and the furthest thing from risk-averse Hillary Clinton).
This superficial branding creates its own bubble, much like the inevitability bubble of early frontrunner status itself, which can burst when the seeming real deal, like a Joe Biden, comes along. It's true, as I've discussed before, that Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley both have longer records of support for marriage equality than Clinton -- Sanders, as a House member in 1996, was one of the few members of Congress to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law -- but neither has been very vocal on the issue recently nor so pivotal to President Obama's successes on LGBT rights as has Biden.
None of this is to say, by any stretch, that Clinton herself is not the real deal, nor that she doesn't right now have solid support from LGBT voters and activists. One recent article interviewed some long-time gay Clinton supporters who said the story of Clinton's emails isn't costing her support among LGBT Democrats. That may be true, but most Democrats don' t care about the email story, which is an obsession of the media and the right.
What they care about much more right now is whether or not a candidate embraces their issues with zeal (as the Sanders surge shows). On LGBT rights, Clinton needs to portray herself that way, speaking forcefully and passionately to the issues, if she wants to make sure a possible Biden run doesn't tap into LGBT support.