Leadership 101: Grade Obama

 

Gay Pride March celebrates new Same Sex Marriage law

A debate has been underway on the left about Barack Obama’s leadership on gay rights issues.  Generally everyone, on the right and on the left, believes that Obama is sympathetic. But should he be doing more, as New York Governor Mario Cuomo did more when he got same sex marriage passed by the New York state legislature.

On the one hand, there are those who don’t think that Obama is assertive enough. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, for instance, thinks that he wants to be liked by everyone and therefore equivocates:

He should draw inspiration from the gay community: one thing gays have to do, after all, is declare who they are at all costs.

On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.

Long-time gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish, on the other hand, has come around to supportingObama’s community-organizer lead-from-behind style.  He says it gets more results that mere speeches, and he credits the president’s tactics for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The president can be effective, however, only with our help:

But when we [activists] have done our job – the education, the debate, the grass roots work, the intellectual framework – he will not stand in our way. He is to the gay rights movement where JFK was with the civil rights movement: waiting to be dragged to endorse us with the clarity we deserve.

Obama and no president should ever be regarded as a savior. In America, we save ourselves.

Dowd’s concern and Sullivan’s perspective got me thinking about a Lucille Clifton call-to-action following the assassination of Martin Luther King:

the meeting after the savior gone
4/4/68

what we decided is
you save your own self.
everybody so quiet
not so much sorry as
resigned
we was going to try and save you but
now i guess you got to save yourselves
(even if you don’t know
who you are
where you been
where you headed

Obama hasn’t died but a number have become disillusioned because he hasn’t fulfilled all the hopes and dreams that he inspired. Then again, a fair number of people, feeling that change wasn’t happening fast enough, had become disillusioned with Martin Luther King by 1968.  Both men would have liked to have saved us but now I guess we have to save ourselves.

And that’s the way it should be.  Charismatic leaders are all very fine.  But a leader can’t move mountains if we’re not helping him or her. If we figure out who we are, where we’ve been, and where we are headed, we allow our leaders to step into their strengths. The decades long push for same sex marriage did this necessary groundwork, with Friday’s legislation the result.

 

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