Supporting Barack Obama

Election times are here again and Obama is going through the same criticisms that all past Presidents face during an election year. If a Democrat is President, the Republicans accuse him of being a bleeding heart socialist who’s out to destroy the American family and raise taxes unreasonably. If a Republican is President, then Democrats accuse him of being a heartless corporate shill who is in the back pocket of CEOs and is a crazy Christian fanatic. As I’m to the left of the political spectrum, I’m biased towards that direction, but I realize that Democrats and Republican Presidents tend to be more complicated than that. In the 2008 elections, I was originally a Hillary supporter, but I’ve grown to like Obama personally. Obama is not as great as his supporters say he is, but he’s not the worst President in our history, as his conservative critics say he is. He’s a decent president, who has accomplished a lot more than we realize.

I read a historian write that you can’t really judge a President until 20 years after his Presidency is over, and the full implications of his policies are played out. I like Obama, but I have a hard time judging him. I generally like the direction of his policies, although I have disagreements with his immigration policies and other issues. It’s hard for me to really judge him just because the Republican opposition has been so vehement. Past Democratic Presidents could always find common ground with moderate and conservative Republicans on some issues to get things accomplished. There really isn’t any common ground between Obama and the conservative Republicans that make up today’s Congress. I don’t really blame Obama for this. Over the past few years, the Republican Party has gotten more uniformly conservative, and these conservative partisans have done what they can to push out the more moderate Republicans from having any influence. More mainstream conservatives like Senator Bennett and Senator Lugar lost elections to Tea Party conservatives who are much less likely to compromise. So the collaborations between Democrats and Republicans on major legislation, like Senator Lugar working with Senator Kennedy on the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 or Lugar’s collaboration with Senator Nunn on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of 1992, Senator Hatch’s famous collaborations with Senator Kennedy on the The Ryan White Aids Act, The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, The Americans with Disabilities Act, and various other legislation, are now less likely. It made me realize how important moderate Republicans really are to the political process.

Many conservative critics say that Obama is our worst President, but I don’t think Obama is a bad President at all. In my lifetime, the worst Presidents are probably Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Both Presidents had some substantial achievements: Nixon opened up relations with China, pursued detente with the Soviet Union, and had some domestic programs that were surprisingly liberal; while Carter negotiated the Camp David Peace Treaty and had an energy conservation program that was decades ahead of its time. Both men though had deeply flawed presidencies that outweighed their good points.

Nixon overreacted to the Pentagon Papers and his enemies list, his use of the government to break into the psychiatric files of Daniel Ellsberg, the stonewalling of the Watergate investigation, his firing of his cabinet after his reelection, all point to a person who abused power and was a threat to the Constitution.

Carter was a good man who was way over his head when he was President. He had Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, yet he kept his distance from the Democratic legislators that he needed to pass his programs, and as the writings of Tip O Neil, Walter Mondale and Ted Kennedy attest, Carter often baffled the people in his own party. Since Carter didn’t take the time to build up relations with these legislators, there was no sense of loyalty to Carter’s more moderate policy proposals among the liberals in the party and the liberals turned to Ted Kennedy during the 1980 Democratic primaries. A President with better political skills, like FDR, wouldn’t have let that happen.

I don’t think Obama is on the level of a Franklin Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln, but I do think he’s a decent President. In researching this blog, I found two articles that do a good job of articulating Obama’s achievements.

Paul Gastris wrote an article for the Washington Monthly called The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama where he wrote:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.

Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.

That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate for greatness.

And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington. His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.

In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other presidents—arguably the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any president since LBJ.

Tim Dickinson wrote an article for Rolling Stone called The Case For Obama where he wrote:

Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America’s social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration’s $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy’s moonshot and one that’s on track to double America’s capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama’s first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls “an Obama imprint on the court for generations.”

What’s even more impressive about Obama’s accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. “He didn’t have the majority that LBJ had,” says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama’s governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat — and Joe Lieberman.

In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the “Party of No” and its billionaire backers. “Obama is harassed as well as opposed,” says Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. “The crazy Republican right is now unfettered. You’ve got a Senate with no adult leadership. And Obama’s up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the professional right.” Compared to the opposition faced by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds Wilentz, “it’s a wholly different scale.”

Despite such obstacles, Obama has succeeded in forging a progressive legacy that, anchored by health care reform, puts him “into the same conversation with FDR and LBJ,” says Brinkley, “though those two accomplished more.” Goodwin, herself a former Johnson aide, likens the thrust of Obama’s social agenda to LBJ’s historic package of measures known as the Great Society. “What is comparable,” she says, “is the idea of using government to expand social and economic justice. That’s what the health care bill is about. That’s what Obama tried to do with the financial reforms. That’s what he’s doing with education. The Great Society was about using the collective energies of the nation to make life better for more people — and that’s what Obama has tried to do.”

When this elections comes along, I’ll follow the advice that Howard Zinn gave to progressives in 2008. Zinn advised progressives to vote for Obama, but that after the elections, to stay active and work to move the public to issues that are important. Don’t rely on just Obama or Congress for progressive change. We have the responsibility to try to move the country towards fairer immigration laws, climate change legislation, gay marriage, controlling corporate power, combating economic inequality and helping the poor and suffering in our community. Howard Zinn wrote in the May 2009 issue of the Progressive Magazine

I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past…

…This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

A youtube video of Barack Obama’s “The Road We’ve Traveled”

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the death of Bin Laden

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the end of the combat mission in Iraq and discussing the future of the U.S. commitment to helping build a stable Iraq

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — legislation to fight pay discrimination and ensure fundamental fairness to American workers

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama talking about stabilizing the auto industry

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court

A youtuve video of Barack Obama nominating US Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court

On Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Failure to Pass the Dream Act

Last week was both a happy time and a sad time for me as I read the news of Congress. Last Saturday, Congress voted 65 to 31 to pass a stand alone bill repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, after the House passed the bill 250 to 174. It was an important promise that President Obama kept for the 13,000 military soldiers who have been dismissed since the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was implemented in the Clinton administration. Sadly, though, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the DREAM Act, was voted down 55 to 41, falling shy of the 60 votes required to limit debate and move forward, essentially killing the legislation for this congressional session. The measure would have offered young illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they pursue a college degree or enlist in the armed forces. For myself, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the fight for the Dream Act were both important civil rights issues and while I was happy about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I was sad about the failure of the Dream Act to pass the Congress.

The passage of the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was possible through the efforts of administration officials, of the persistent leadership of Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Harry Reid, Senator Susan Collins and Representative Patrick Murphy. The people most responsible for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are the activists and discharged military personnel who lobbied and pressured government officials to keep the repeal of this discriminatory policy as a high priority. This is in keeping with a theory I have that social change comes from both political activists pressuring the government from outside the system, and reform politicians fighting for change inside the system. Only when both groups are fighting in conjunction can social change take place.

If we look back in history, we see that the fight for inclusion in the armed forces has had a significant influence in the history of civil rights. In the Civil War, Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists lobbied Lincoln hard to allow African Americans to serve in the Union Army. Lincoln was persuaded to allow African Americans to be in the military in the Fall on 1862 and during the Civil War federal statistics indicate that 178,975 black men served in the Union army during the Civil War. In addition, some 18,000 black men joined the U.S. Navy.

During World War II, Japanese Americans who were interned wanted to join the military to prove their loyalty to the United States. Two months after the declaration of war, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which rounded up Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and put them in internment camps. Over 110,000 West Coast Japanese Americans were interred, 70,000 of them U.S citizens. These Japanese Americans who joined the military included the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was the most decorated unite in military history.

In January 1948 President Truman decided to end segregation in the armed forces and the civil service through executive order rather than through legislation. This followed report of the Gillem Board “Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Postwar Army Policy,” issued in 1947 that concluded that the Army’s future policy should be to “eliminate, at the earliest practicable moment, any special consideration based on race.” Truman issued the executive order in spite of fierce resistance, and actually integration was slow until the Korean War. During that war, insufficient white replacement troops were available and black enlistments were high. Russ Bynum, a military writer, wrote an article on Oct 30, 2010 gave a quote from Marcus S. Cox, a history professor at The Citadel, about the similar arguments about gays serving in the military and integrating the armed forces:

Arguments today in favor of keeping the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” – that openly serving gays would disrupt morale and erode the cohesion of combat units – echo those used to defend military segregation along racial lines, said Marcus S. Cox, a history professor at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

“Many people used that same argument against African-Americans serving in the same units as whites,” said Cox, who teaches black military history to Citadel cadets. “Many people said it’s the end of the military. But the result was there were very few problems, the military ran very efficiently.”

Women also fought discrimination to be able to serve in the military. During World War II, 47,000 women nurses served in the U.S. Army and 11,000 in the U.S. Navy. After the war, the generals and admirals who had once been dubious about woman serving in the military became enthusiastic after seeing the valor of these women’s service. They pressured Congress to have permanent women’s units in each service. In an informative blog Reader’s Companion to Military History, it writes:

In the mid-1970s, the feminist movement and the end of the draft forced the military to abolish the separate women’s units and to integrate its women and men. Women were kept out of combat roles (including practically all infantry, armor, artillery, combat aircraft, and combat warship billets). In global perspective, the United States did, however, take the lead, passing the 12 percent female proportion in 1990 and systematically expanding the scope of women’s activity. The first women reached flag rank in 1970 (army), 1971 (air force), and 1972 (navy), and they had command over significant numbers of men.

The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a tremendous civil rights victory, but the defeat of the DREAM Act was a tremendous blow to civil rights. The bill would’ve given legal status to those who were brought to the U.S. before age 16, have been here for five years, have no criminal record, graduated from high school or gained an equivalency degree and who joined the military or attend college. If you read these requirements, these people are not just getting a free ride to citizenship but are earning their right and are being trained in ways that benefit our country. So for these people who want to serve our country in the military or attend colleges to join a highly educated workforce, they are denied that avenue because of stereotypes that people have against illegal immigrants. This is wrong.

I love this country, but the United States does not have a good history when it comes to exploiting immigrant for their cheap labor, then subjecting them to discrimination. Look at the example of Chinese immigrants. In the late 1800s, the United States initially welcomed Chinese immigrants to fill a shortage of workers. The early Chinese migrants helped drain the swamps of California’s swamplands and worked in the California gold mines. In 1867, 12,000 Chinese were employed by the Central Pacific Railroad, comprising 90 percent of the entire workforce. They cleared the trees, lay the track, operated the power drills and handled the explosives for boring tunnels through the Donner Summit. In 1870, 18 percent of all farm laborers in California were Chinese. In all of the fields that they entered, the Chinese immigrants were paid less than their white counterparts, and their labor was often cynically used to control the wages of all worker groups. This led other groups to resent Chinese workers and led to harassment and discrimination. American white miners felt threatened by the Chinese competition and pressured the California legislature to pass a tax that required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen, which aimed at the Chinese immigrants since a 1790 federal law reserved naturalized citizenship to white persons. In 1862, the California legislature passed a law “to protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California”, a law that levied a tax of $2.50 per month on all Chinese residing in the state, except those Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in mines, or those engaged in the sugar, rice, coffee and tea industries. The resentments that were building up against the Chinese Americans resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Irish immigrants in the 1800s faced discrimination as well. Almost 2 million Irish Catholics immigrated to the U.S. between 1820 and 1860 as a result of the Irish famine, and they worked in canal building, lumbering, and civil construction works in the Northeast. Irish Catholics were mocked in schools and The Know Nothing Movement made it their goal to oust Catholics from public office. They faced job discrimination with the “HELP WANTED – NO IRISH NEED APPLY” signs that popped up in many industries.

After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, other immigrant groups were welcomed to fill up the shortages in labor. During the 1890s and early 1900s, California farmers worried about the tons of fruit and vegetables that rotted in the fields as a result of labor shortages, and they began employing Japanese immigrants to meet their labor needs. Between 1885 and 1924, 200,000 Japanese went to Hawaii and 180,000 went to the U.S. mainland to work in plantations and farmlands. When Japanese workers demanded higher wages, Asian Indians Sikhs were employed as laborers. Between 1910 and 1917, the Mexican Revolution sparked a migration of one tenth of the Mexican population to seek refuge in the United States. Over 16,000 Mexicans worked on the railroads in the West in 1908, and at least 150,000 of California’s 200,000 farm laborers were Mexican immigrants in the 1920s. Filipino workers began immigrating to Hawaii and the mainland U.S. in the early 1900s to work in agriculture. By 1930, over 110,000 Filipinos were in Hawaii and 40,000 were in the mainland. In each case, the different immigrant groups faced the same discrimination as the earlier Chinese immigrants. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the National Origins Act of 1924 prohibited Japanese immigration and barred the entry of women from China, Japan, Korea and India. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 provided for the eventual independence of the Philippines, but also limited Filipino immigration to fifty people per year. The 1922 Cable Act even stipulated that any American woman who married an immigrant ineligible for citizenship was to cease being a citizen of the United States.

The pattern of all these immigrant groups is the same. They are initially welcomed to this country for their cheap labor and to fill up labor shortages in certain industries. When these immigrants get tired of being exploited and demand greater rights, then laws are passed that discriminate against them and they’re denied any means of becoming citizens of this country, in spite of the contributions that they’ve made to our country’s industries. Some illegal immigrants do come across for criminal activities like drug trafficking and should be prosecuted to the fullest extant by our law enforcement. The vast majority of illegal immigrants, however, are honest hard workers who are just trying to find a better life for themselves and their families that they cannot find in Mexico. And there are industries here in the U.S. willing to hire them and exploit their cheap labor. This historic pattern of exploitation and discrimination has to stop.

The reason I support the Dream Act is for fairness to the children of these illegal immigrants. African American soldiers during the Civil War served so they could show their white Americans of their worthiness to be treated as equal American citizens. Japanese Americans served in the military to prove their loyalty as American citizens. Gays who want to serve in the military want to show their patriotism to their country. The children of illegal immigrants went out in the open to lobby for the Dream Act to earn the right to be American citizens. If they want to earn a right to be American citizens, we should give them a chance to earn it.

A youtube video of the Gay Veterans Memorial in Cathedral City

A youtube video of Joe Lieberman and gay and lesbian veterans lobbying Congress to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

A youtube video of a student trying to lobby Senator McCain to pass the Dream Act

A youtube video of a student activist after the Dream Act passed the House vote

A youtube video of another student activist who related his story of supporting the Dream Act

A youtube video of Senators Dick Durbin and Daniel Inouye speaking for their support of the Dream Act

A youtube video of President Obama being heckled by activists for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Though I like Obama, I think the activists were right to keep pressure on Obama to keep his promise

A youtube video of President Obama signing the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy

A youtube video of Lt. Dan Choi protesting the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy

A youtube video of Senator Harry Reid and Lt. Dan Choi

On Repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” This December

Many people have been exasperated by the Obama administration’s appeal of a recent court case that repeals DADT and I understand that frustration. During the 2008 campaign and in his State of the Union earlier this year, Obama promised to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy that has been in effect since the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. Many worthy soldiers have been dismissed from the military because of this unjust policy and many gay rights activists rightly see this military policy as discriminatory practice. Many of my gay friends have been disillusioned at Obama’s slowness on this and other gay rights issues. I share their frustration, but I also like Obama, and wanted to learn more about what Obama’s strategy is on repealing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. So I did some research on the web and I asked around some knowleadgable people and this is what I found.

From what I understand any court case that repeals DADT would probably be appealed by a conservative group if it is not appealed by the Department of Justice. Eventually it would go to the Supreme Court sometime in 2011, where Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas would probably vote against a repeal and Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer would probably vote for repeal. Then that means the final vote to consider would by Anthony Kennedy’s. Kennedy’s record on gay rights is mixed. According to what I found in a few links, Kennedy supported the 1996 decision, Romer v. Evans, which invalidated a provision in the Colorado Constitution denying homosexuals the right to bring local discrimination claims and supported the 2003 decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated Texas sodomy laws. In 2000, though, Kennedy supported Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which allows the Boy Scouts to ban gays and lesbians from being scoutmasters. The lawyers who are fighting for gay marriage through the courts right now are gearing their arguments with Anthony Kennedy in mind.

Obama has stated that he prefers to repeal DADT through Congress rather than the courts. Both he and Gates are pinning their hopes on a Department of Defense report that is to be published on December 1 that would discuss the ramifications of repealing DADT. Both hope that a Department of Defense report that supports repeal would provide cover for Senators to vote for a repeal in a December session. Many Senators have stated that they would abide by whatever the Defense report recommends.

So Obama’s strategy for repealing DADT hinges on a positive report by the Department of Defense on December 1. I see two possible risks with Obama’s strategy. The first risk is that it is not clear what the Department of Defense report may conclude. Gates and Obama may have some idea as to what the rough outlines of the report will state, but I couldn’t find anything to confirm that. The second risk is that those Senators who promised to abide by the Department of Defense report may still back out if they’re pressured by conservative groups. Last summer, for instance, Republican Charles Grassley backed out of supporting health care reform due to tea party pressure and began making stupid comments about death panels.

If a vote comes in the Senate in December to repeal DADT, I think the best thing would be to flood with emails and phone calls those Senators that promised to abide by their promise to repeal DADT if the Department of Defense report recommends it. Here are some possible Senators to contact between now and Christmas

First contact Senator John McCain. He has said that he would abide by the Department of Defense report that may recommend repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Contact him and tell him not to filibuster a debate in December and to keep his word to abide by the Department of Defense report that comes out December 1.

You could also contact Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, George Voinovich, or Scott Brown. All have expressed an interest in supporting repeal pending the Department of Defense report. Susan Collins voted for a repeal of DADT in a Senate Arms Service Committee.

A last person to possibly contact would be Senator Joe Lieberman Joe Lieberman. Lieberman strongly opposes the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and earlier this year proposed to repeal the policy. Lieberman is a liberal on social issues yet is also a hawk who is respected in the military community. He is also friends of both John McCain and Susan Collins, two Senators who are important in the debate to repeal the law.

Though Obama has been cautious in fighting for gay rights issues, John Schwarz notes in a September 21, 2010 New York Times article that Obama has created an environment to expand gay rights. Schwarz wrote:

The district court judges are reflecting an increasingly obvious shift in public opinion, said Andrew Koppelman, a professor of law at Northwestern University. “The gay rights movement has been a spectacularly successful movement for cultural change,” he said. “A few decades ago these people were cultural pariahs. It was taken for granted that gay people are mentally ill, contaminated and unclean. Now the cultural valence has flipped — it is that view of gay people which is itself stigmatized.”

As life-tenured appointees, judges can look beyond politics to posterity, Professor Koppelman said. “Right now it seems like a good bet that if you are friendly to gay rights claims,” he said, “future generations will honor you for that.”

President Obama has had an effect as well, said Jennifer Pizer, director of the national marriage project of the Western regional office of Lamba Legal, a public interest legal group for gay issues.

Activists have criticized the president for the Justice Department’s defense of the federal laws being challenged, but he has also urged the repeal of laws that discriminate against gay men and lesbians.

“Having the president repeatedly say these rules discriminate and cause harm — so the discussion shifts to choice of processes for removing them rather than justifying them — seems to have changed the discussion,” she said.

On that, Ms. Pizer and Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, agree, though he deplores the trend. “I think he’s creating an environment in which the courts feel comfortable pushing the envelope with these decisions,” Mr. Perkins said.

Senators Dick Durbin and Joe Lieberman were joined by veterans and equality advocates discuss repealling “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and and passing the “DREAM Act”.

Senator Joe Lieberman talks to gay and lesbian veterans to help them lobby Congress to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Senator Susan Collins explaining her vote last week to filibuster a bill that includes repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, even though she supports a repeal of the policy.

A debate between Senator Carl Levin and Senator John McCain on the Defense Authorization bill that includes a provision that repeals Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Here is a link to a military survey which shows that most U.S. military personnel said they wouldn’t object to serving beside openly gay troops.