Obama Picks Up LGBT Supporters From Edwards

[WillyT]

Obama Picks Up LGBT Supporters From Edwards
A critical mass of John Edwards’s LGBT steering committee is going public with support for Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton.

By Kerry Eleveld
An Advocate.com exclusive posted February 1, 2008

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A critical mass of John Edwards’s LGBT steering committee is going public with support for Sen. Barack Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton. Twenty-two members of the Edwards campaign’s original 59-person gay and lesbian committee will now be working for Obama victories next Tuesday and throughout the rest of the primary season.

The new Obama converts include Eric Stern, who headed up Edwards’s LGBT steering committee, and longtime gay activist David Mixner, who famously campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1992, holding some of the first gay fund-raisers for a U.S. presidential candidate.

Mixner, a peace activist during the war in Vietnam, came out early for Edwards after the former North Carolina senator made an unequivocal case for ending the Iraq war at the historic Riverside Church in New York City.

Mixner said Obama’s clear and consistent opposition to the war is also driving his decision on this go-around. “Moving from one candidate to another is never an easy process,” he said, “but the times demand that we all participate fully and completely to bring about change. Originally, my support went to Senator Edwards because of the war in Iraq. For the very same reason, I am supporting Senator Obama. This is not even a close call for me.”

Stern, who served more generally as a political adviser to the Edwards campaign, said he met with Hillary Clinton’s director of LGBT outreach, Mark Walsh, and had several phone conversations with Tobias Wolff, the chair of Obama’s national LGBT policy committee.

“I have mentors working on the Clinton campaign,” said Stern, who is also a former director of LGBT outreach for the Democratic National Committee in California. “Their outreach was as aggressive and as sincere. It’s been a difficult choice for many of us.”

Of the remaining 37 former steering committee members, Stern said another eight were leaning Obama, three were fully committed to Clinton, and others remained undecided or had not contacted him.

Stern admitted that he had already been moving toward supporting Obama, mainly because, like Edwards, Obama has refused to take money from special interest groups. He also feels that Obama has the “purest position” of the any of the three candidates in supporting full repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act since 2004. Clinton supports repealing only the part of DOMA that prohibits the federal government from recognizing state sanctioned same-sex marriages, leaving in place the portion that allows states to ignore legal unions performed in other states.

After meeting with both Obama’s and Clinton’s LGBT leaders, “it became clear to me personally that our committee had a vision for the role of the LGBT community that was similar to the role that LGBT supporters were already playing in the Obama campaign,” said Stern. “It is a pure grassroots, activist-oriented operation,” he added, noting that the 22 committee members will now be taking part in Obama’s field operations as well as the policy and press departments. “Thus far, it's clear that we will play a similar role in the Obama campaign.”

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Link: http://advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid52017.asp

:shrug: