When President Obama finally rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline last month, it felt like the capstone on a series of accomplishments for three movements I followed diligently during Obama’s first term: Climate change, Dreamers, and LGBT activists. As I covered the LGBT movement, I tracked how activists in each of these movements fared on their goals for the Obama administration in order to get a sense of what was and wasn’t working for them.
Coming off the fallout this week of yet another mass shooting reverberating through the country, it seemed a good moment to review where these three movements excelled in accomplishing their goals, in hopes of finding ways to apply those lessons to other movements. One caveat, of course, is that advances are always peculiar to the political environment in which they take place. So not all of these lessons will be immediately applicable to gun safety since, in this case, each of these movements were generally pushed by progressive activists who were pressuring a progressive president and progressive lawmakers. My other caveat is that while I’m intimately familiar with the LGBT movement, I’m an outsider to the other two movements and so my observations are less informed.
The LGBT movement arguably made the most progress at the federal level during Obama’s presidency. While the DREAM and climate change movements both accomplished important goals that once seemed highly unlikely, the LGBT movement succeeded in doing something that none of the other two movements did: Get a signature piece of legislation through Congress in Obama’s first two years while Democrats still controlled both chambers. In fact, LGBT activists got two bills through—one expanding hate crimes protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity (among other characteristics) and one repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
But repeal was really the whopper for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that almost no one on the Hill and even in the White House imagined that it could be done in the first two years. In fact, when I interviewed a key lobbyist on repeal a handful of months after lawmakers overturned the law, he said his “biggest takeaway” was “how much everyone misread the politics” of repealing the law, from the White House to Congress to the interest groups.
“Why did the best political minds in the country not understand that the public was ready for repeal when it actually was.”
The lesson here is that public opinion can help influence the debate but it is not solely determinative, especially once a certain mindset gets entrenched on Capitol Hill (i.e. conventional wisdom). Public opinion then has to be employed by activists as one of many tools that can be used to generate movement. Heading into 2009, for instance, support for repeal was routinely polling at anywhere between 60 and 70 percent, depending on how the question was framed. They were the type of numbers that should have inspired confidence even among the most risk-averse politicians, yet most Democrats were all too happy to let a final vote on “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal languish until the last several days of the session.
But repeal wasn’t just a major win when compared against the other progressive priorities that didn’t pass. It was also a major win when set against some of President Obama’s major gets during the 111th Congress—in particular, health care reform and the nearly $800 billion stimulus package. Both bills emerged in the first several months of the administration as non-negotiables. That the president would put the full weight of his administration behind both efforts was never in question—the economy’s free-fall necessitated the stimulus on one hand and, on the other, Obama decided he would stake his presidency on health care reform. By comparison, there was never any indication in the first year of the administration that repeal was an urgent priority in the same vein as the stimulus and health care. So ending the gay ban really forced its way onto the agenda of the 111th Congress.
That repeal succeeded in passing was nothing short of a miracle. I say this from the vantage point of having reported on the effort at the time and also having spent several years chronicling it among other LGBT advances in my book, “Don’t Tell Me To Wait.”
So why repeal—especially when the climate change bill and immigration reform along with its little brother the DREAM Act all failed to advance? My big-picture (and perhaps oversimplified) answer to that question is that the LGBT movement employed the most effective combination of both an inside game and an outside game during that two-year period. DREAM activists, by comparison, worked an incredibly good outside game. They protested repeatedly and displayed a real sense of urgency—similar to that of LGBT activists and, in fact, often did so in greater numbers. It was enough pressure to at least secure a Senate vote on the DREAM Act—albeit unsuccessful—before the close of the 111th Congress. That’s more than can be said for the Washington insiders who were pushing comprehensive immigration reform, which never got a vote despite the fact that Obama had promised to pass it during his first year as president.
Where the Dreamers ran into trouble, I think, was on the Hill. One Democratic Hill staffer I interviewed for my book who had a deep interest in both DADT and DREAM concluded that the LGBT movement simply had advocates who were more embedded on the Hill than the DREAM movement did. One example was the Human Rights Campaign’s legislative director at the time, Allison Herwitt, who had nearly two decades of experience working on the Hill by 2010. While reporting my book, several Hill staffers said she had the ability to get the attention of lawmakers at critical moments.
In December of 2010, for instance, Herwitt pulled then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer aside at a cocktail party and reminded him that before the new stand-alone repeal bill could clear the Senate during the Lame Duck session, the House needed to find a vehicle for passing it since the repeal language had originally been folded into the broader Defense authorization bill. It’s confusing but, bottom line, some procedural hoops had to be jumped through to make the final Senate vote on repeal possible and Hoyer, who was very committed to overturning the policy, found a way to make that happen. That was crucial during a Lame Duck session that turned out to be a whirlwind of activity between extending the Bush tax cuts, reauthorizing the START Treaty, and the votes to keep the government funded, among other last-minute efforts.
My attention to the inside game here may make it sound like I think that was the most important part of the equation, but that’s not actually the case. What was unique to the LGBT movement from the previous dozen or so years was the outside game waged by grassroots activists. Those efforts are documented in great detail in my book and, without them, repeal wouldn’t have stood a chance in those first two years.
But in terms of what distinguished the gays from the Dreamers during those final months of 2010, it was the inside game. One of the handicaps for the DREAM movement also seemed to be that immigration establishment types didn’t coalesce around DREAM until more than half way through 2010. Prior to that, they were still pushing comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) and many immigration advocates viewed DREAM as a distraction from CIR. But for much of 2010, the Dreamers and LGBT activists both put forward a robust series of protests and actions that forced lawmakers to consider their issues. What separated the outcomes of those two legislative quests was what happened once they finally generated some movement on the Hill.
The environmental movement, meanwhile, did not seem to begin a fervent outside push to reject Keystone XL until the beginning of 2011—or at least not one that focused specifically on Washington. Bill McKibben, the cofounder of 350.org who helped lead a series of D.C.-focused protests in 2011 that set a new tone for the movement on Keystone XL, had not been all that persuaded initially that the LGBT movement’s Washington protests were all that effective.
In particular, LGBT activists staged a protest on the mall in October 2009 that drew about 200,000 people. But McKibben reportedly felt the massive rally had mostly failed to put political pressure on Washington lawmakers. Here’s a post from Grist.org, a progressive blog, that same month:
If the mainstream media is going to largely ignore a mass demonstration on the national mall—such as Sunday’s National Equality March for gay rights—public demonstrations might as well be small, numerous, and spread all over, says 350.org founder Bill McKibben.
Also, they should be beautiful.
McKibben—writer, Grist board member, and an occasional contributor–was reflecting on the future of activism during a call with reporters and bloggers to promote the International Day of Climate Action on Saturday, October 24. Where the equality march was centralized, the climate day will consist of thousands of events scattered across the globe—some rallies, others closer to performance art. Church bells will ring 350 times, mountain climbers will hang “350” banners, and the Maldives Cabinet will hold an underwater meeting in hopes that the island nation won’t end up submerged beneath a rising ocean.
To McKibben, this strategy is more in sync with today’s decentralized online media.
“The world works differently now,” he said on Tuesday’s call. “It’s dispersed. Using that dispersed architecture to rally public sentiment is what we’ve been trying to do.”
I fully agree with McKibben that the power of so many of these progressive movements today—including one of the newest arrivals, Black Lives Matter—is that they are decentralized, emergent movements that come from multiple directions. That means no one person or organization can be bought off or ordered to stand down for partisan reasons. The environmental movement had a particularly rich network of more localized movements nationwide. But I still believe that at some point activists have to find a way to funnel that disparate energy directly at Washington in order to make a difference at the federal level. Keystone XL became that vehicle.
McKibben did, ultimately, think LGBT activists had done something right. I know partly because he has written about it and partly because I sat in a room where he and several other climate change activists quizzed several LGBT activists about how repeal had gotten across the finish line. It was August 17, 2011, just a few days before 350.org, Bold Nebraska, and other groups staged an epic two-week action in front of the White House in which more than 1,200 activists were arrested protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. While the entire protest was already planned at that point, one of the focal points of our discussion was around messaging. We told them that we found going directly at the White House and President Obama himself had been the best way to get the media’s attention and, thus, some political leverage.
Those late August protests were the beginning of a long march toward the ultimate rejection of Keystone XL. Whatever one might think of the practical importance of that win, the symbolic importance was enormous. Activists had taken on the billion-dollar fossil fuel industry and won. Over the course of multiple White House protests, the climate change movement demonstrated palpable political energy right at the door of the White House. In response, approval of the pipeline that once seemed almost a foregone conclusion in 2010/2011 was delayed by President Obama as he campaigned for reelection in 2012 and finally rejected once and for all last month.
Though the Dreamers did not prevail legislatively, they too intensified their efforts, telling the White House in no uncertain terms that President Obama did, in fact, have the executive authority to provide deportation relief to them. That resulted in a series of executive actions in both 2012 and late last year, some of which are still being held up by a court challenge from Republicans.
While there’s plenty more to explore in terms of the particular strengths and characteristics of each of these movements and what produces legislation (along with what affects executive power), the baseline lesson here is that any movement needs both inside and outside players. They don’t necessarily need to like each other or even communicate that much. The outside players provide a backbone for what it is often an otherwise spineless organism in Washington. However, once the issue is forced, it takes an inside game to seal the deal. In essence, the insiders and outsiders need each other in order to enact legislation, even if that’s a painful admission for an uncomfortable alliance.