The Legacy of Barack Obama (Pssst--He's Not the Worst!)

By now you've probably heard about the poll that says Obama is the worst president since the end of World War II. We've still got several years to go, but it seems voters have made up their minds about the man who was to bring us hope, change, and a post-racial America.

The worst president ever?

You can debate whether or not you agree with President Obama's policies, but you can't argue that he hasn't achieved a majority of them. According to Politifact, Obama has basically achieved 69 percent of what he said he would do. Among some of the most significant "promises kept" include bringing troops out of Iraq, seeking verifiable reductions in nuclear warhead stockpiles, and creating new financial regulations, which include the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (created by now-Senator Elizabeth Warren), a financial stability oversight council, an audit of the Federal Reserve, credit card rules, and regulation of over-the-counter derivatives.

Admittedly, there are many "promises broken," and it seems that just about all his policies are controversial. But I'd like to focus on several and argue that now only has President Obama been one of our most consequential presidents ever, but he has also been one of the best.

Is it too really early to talk about Obama's place in history? I don't think so, and neither do a variety of opinions, found here, here, here, here, here, and here, with some authors suggesting that (despite this recent decline in his approval rating) his place could be anywhere from seventeenth best to fourth best. So what is the Obama legacy? We don't have time to go over everything--every accomplishment, every failure, every debate--but I'd at least like to make a few points on the following:  

Health Care and the Economy. President Obama has transformed the U.S. healthcare system profoundly. The Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") alone makes him the single most consequential president in a generation or more.

To understand its significance, one must first understand the state of American healthcare. As John McDonough of the Harvard School of Medicine explains, the U.S. has "far and away" the costliest healthcare in the world. As he has put it, if we're spending so much money relative to other countries, "one might expect we would be doing significantly better." Since 1980, however, costs have skyrocketed.

How are we doing compared to other nations? Not so good. Compared to other higher-income nations, the U.S. usually ranks the lowest (with the U.K. and the Netherlands ranking as the highest). Among care effectiveness and safety, efficiency, and equity, we are usually among the worst. Even though spending is so high (for a variety of reasons), healthcare here isn't performed as well as other developed nations.

The ACA helps fix that. Among its ten titles, the first title alone would be the most aggressive reforms ever. Consider the reforms in Title I (based on Romneycare): Young adults can stay on their parents' plans until 26. Now there is a Medical Loss Ratio, in which insurance companies have to write a rebate check if premium dollars spent were not related to medical costs. (Billions of dollars have been referred back to patients.) Subsidies are now rewarded for people above the Medicaid threshold, and (despite a terribly pathetic start), there are at least 27 federally facilitated marketplaces. All of these allow consumers to better compare which health plan is right for them. All of those are simply in Title I.

Title II was the Medicaid expansion. Contrary to what most people think, for the most part if you're a non-disabled adult with no children, in most states, poor people didn't have access to insurance through Medicaid. Not so anymore. Unfortunately, while the Supreme Court validated Congress' utilization of the individual mandate under its taxing power, it simultaneously declared that states do not have to be forced to be involved in the expansion. 26 states are expanding, while 21 are not (and four are debating). Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich invoked Christianity in his argument to join the expansion: his belief is that when he dies and goes to St. Peter, he's not going to be asked what he did to keep government small, but what he did to help the poor.

But the intransigence of the other Republican governors is puzzling at best and inhumane at worst. Despite the federal government paying 100% of the funds for the first three years, changing the typical 50-80% cost of coverage (so typically, for every dollar a state spends on Medicaid, the feds write a check for 56 cents), many states with conservative governors have refused the funding and instead allow their poorer citizens to continue to suffer. Still, one can be hopeful. Medicaid was crated in 1965 and was optional for states; it took about 5-6 years for a majority of states to join. The last was Arizona--in 1982.

The remaining titles involve changes to Medicare to improve benefits for enrollees to get free annual wellness exams with no cost sharing. Calorie labeling is required on chain restaurant menus for every item. Helping patients quit tobacco is now covered. The cost of the law--about $950 billion (mostly from Titles I and II) are completely self-financed, often through taxes, such as those on tanning beds. And it is expected to lower the federal deficit (although only by a bit).

Beyond the ACA, there was the American Recovery Act, or the "stimulus." There have been few laws as consequential as this one. While most American presidents barely get half of a major bill signed in one term, Obama essentially had five in one within his first month in office: the largest investments in healthcare and science since LBJ, the largest tax cut since Reagan, the largest infrastructure spending since Eisenhower, and the largest investment in education ever. This law has fundamentally changed the country for the better. As Michael Grunwald has written in "The New New Deal," the Recovery Act injected an emergency shot of fiscal stimulus into an economy hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month. Moody's, IHS Global Insight, and the CBO have all agreed that it helped enormously.

We have recently had five straight months of job gain above 200,000, the highest since the 1990s tech boom. But have we heard much about it? No. Instead, we hear a lot about this particular poll about how terrible Obama is. President Clinton likes to cite statistics that in the roughly equal amount of years that Democrats and Republicans have controlled the White House since World War II, Democrats have created more jobs. Jordan Weissmann of the Atlantic (of all places) says this is more complex, that it's more due to luck and that there hasn't been consistency among the parties' presidents and their ideologies within their own parties. True to some extent: Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton, who wasn't Jimmy Carter, who wasn't Lyndon Johnson. Ronald Reagan is far different from Dwight Eisenhower. But the point I'd like to make is that Obama has been liberal but also pragmatic on the economy and on other issues, willing to be advantageous (the GM rescue, the Bin Laden raid) and willing to fail (as is the case with gun control, but this is more due to an ignorant Congress and an even dumber--yet tiny--part of the public). Second, Obama has indeed been liberal, and yet liberals have grown cynical of him. And so I ask this of liberals: Is the fervor and excitement you have for Senator Warren any different than what you had for then-Senator Obama? Would a President Warren really be so much more progressive than President Obama? Has there ever been a president who has accomplished as many liberal goals as this one? Even before the regulations of healthcare, the financial institutions, and polluters, the Left, under Obama, got tobacco regulation, massive forest protection, and the Matthew Shepard Act, things they were trying to achieve for years.

Incidentally, "fiscally responsible" House Republicans--who created a several trillion dollar hole in eight years--offered their own version of stimulus in 2009 in the form of a $715 billion, and yet that gets to be defined as fiscal responsibility. And, according to Grunwald, there is a bit of hypocrisy involved: Paul Ryan requested money for green-job training in Wisconsin, Michelle Bachmann and Joe "You Lie!" Wilson also requested funds, as did Mitch McConnell, who wrote five letters for electric car factories in Kentucky. Governors Rick Perry and Jan Brewer both accepted the funds.

These very Republicans like to tell us that the stimulus failed. It did not, at least not according to the 80% of University of Chicago survey of economists who said it lowered unemployment and increased GDP to 3.8% at its peak.

Foreign Policy
When I voted for Obama in 2008, I never, in a million years, figured Osama bin Laden would be killed. I assumed he was long, long gone (dead or alive). But now he's dead, and Obama's the one who got him. As William Dobson said, Obama "exorcised" the demons of the foreign policy mistakes during the Carter and Clinton era.

But what about the crisis in Iraq with ISIS? That's all Obama's fault, right? Well, first of all, it was the Bush administration that not only invaded the country on false pretenses (and recall that it was Obama who rightfully called it a "dumb war"), and it was the Bush administration which negotiated the end date, and it was the al-Maliki regime that insisted (under pressure from the Iranians--oh, the irony) that the Americans leave. This crisis is not Obama's fault, and leaving the country remains one of his greatest accomplishments.

Dylan Matthews at Vox reminds us of six numbers that no one should ever forget: over 126,000 civilian deaths; 4,486 dead American service members; 2 million refugees; $817 billion lost in direct costs and trillions more in indirect costs; Freedom House's rating Iraq's "democracy" as a 6, or "not free," (with the worst possible number being 7), meaning it is essentially as democratic as Iran; and finally, perhaps the most important--0, which is the amount of weapons of mass destruction found. A war based on false pretenses that has completely destroyed a nation. Is it the fault of the current occupant of the Oval Office, or his predecessor?

President Obama's foreign policy has, simply put, been a success.

The Environment
Global warming is the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Coined by Garret Hardin in the 1960s, the idea of the tragedy of the commons is that people share a finite resource but are motivated by their own self-interest. Hardin used the idea of a pasture with competing farmers and their cows; one farmer might notice that another farmer has more cows, so he tries to compete. The obvious solution is that the resource is destroyed. "The population problem," he wrote, "has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension of morality." Hardin quoted William Foster Llyod, who wrote, "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." In other words, the problem is not fixable--the resource (the planet, our only home)--is doomed.

President Obama hasn't taken that attitude. He has acted, many times alone without the help of Congress. The fuel efficiency standards he set are estimated to eliminate 1/6 of U.S. aid on imports by 2025. There are also now tightened efficiency standards for light bulbs, furnaces, refrigerators, dishwashers, and air conditioners. Cold-drink vending machines now will reduce enough energy demand to power over a million homes. At least 680,000 low-income homes have been weatherized. Solar power now is the fast-growing industry.

The President should be applauded for his efforts. His administration's record includes pumping tens of billions of dollars into renewable energy and making it immensely difficult for any new coal plant to open unless it can effectively capture its carbon and store it (which at this point is fairly impossible). On June 2, in what Matt Yglesis called the single most important day in Obama's second term, Obama's EPA announced their intent to regulate the CO2 emissions from the nation's coal plants. The New York Times reports that this could result in a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.

One more thing. If somebody has the gall to say that because we had a bad winter, global warming is not man-made, please remind them that not only does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change strongly state that global warming is happening and humans are behind most of it, but also that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences found that 98 percent of scientists agreed with the theory that mankind was exacerbating global warming. Incidentally, it's called global warming, not Northeast Ohio warming. To paraphrase Justin Gillis, a snowstorm in Cleveland does not extinguish a severe drought in California or devastating forest fires in Russia.

LGBT Issues
Andrew Sullivan and Newsweek were right to call Obama our first gay president. While initially appearing unwilling to fight for these causes, Obama is officially the first sitting president to support same-sex marriage; his Justice Department stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act (which the Supreme Court eventually partly nullified); he signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Act to classify crimes against LGBT individuals as hate crimes. (The law had been blocked for more than a decade.) He proudly repealed a discriminatory and waste-of-money law that never should have been written in the first place: Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now, LGBT soldiers can serve openly. Regarding transgender equality, he has been the best (and there is no second place among his fellow presidents).

Obama seems to be a communitarian who deeply values human rights and dignity. E pluribus unum is frequently mentioned by him. But would he have been committed to these actions and policies if he were president in 2001? Probably not. In 1996, he claimed to support same-sex marriage (and if this is accurate then he was way ahead of the country) but then he became a senator and ran for president in 2008, the year of California's infamous (and now gone) ban on marriage equality. He changed his mind on marriage equality, before changing it again famously before the 2012 election. It has been asked if Obama is leading the fight or riding its waves. It's probably the latter. His actions regarding equality and rights have been phenomenal, though it does seem that his cautiousness has guided him more than a belief that he is marching the country down the moral arc of the universe.

Which brings me to my next point: President Obama certainly has his failings, as all presidents do. He has unfortunately sometimes surrounded himself with bad advisers, especially on education issues. Here's what former under-Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch has to say about the President's record on education:

"The most unexpected supporter of corporate reform was President Barack Obama. Educators enthusiastically supported Obama, expecting that he would eliminate the noxious policies of President Bush's No Child Left Behind. They assumed, given his history as a community organizer and his sympathy for society's least fortunate, that his administration would adopt policies that responded to the needs of children, rather than concentrating on testing and accountability.

The first big surprise for educators occurred when President Obama abandoned Linda Darlin-Hammond and selected Arne Duncan, who had run the low-performing schools of Chicago, as secretary of education. The second big surprise--shock, actually--happened when the Obama administration released the details of Race to the Top, its major initiative, which was designed in Secretary Duncan's office with the help of consultants from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and other advocates of high-stakes testing and charter schools.

There was very little difference between Race to the Top and NCLB. The Obama program preserved testing, accountability, and choice at the center of the federal agenda. Race to the Top was even more punitive than NCLB."

Obama is also partly to blame for the death of immigration reform, and his lethal and criminal use of drone strikes could have fundamentally destructive effects in the future. Battles he has fought could likely define him as a war criminal. Ryan Cooper at The Week fiercely declares that Obama could have helped create over a million more jobs had he not become so invested in deficit reduction. He should be held accountable for all these actions.

But still, I am not looking for perfection, for surely there never has been, nor will there ever be, a perfect president. All the presidents, regardless of party or ideology or era, seem to be guilty of at least one terrible thing or another. It seems criminal behavior is simply a job requirement. I am not a single-issue voter, and I avoid litmus tests. As the Vice President likes to say, "Don't compare me to the Almighty--compare me to the alternative."

Mark my words: warts and all, Barack Obama will be remembered as one of America's greatest presidents.

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All These Scandals Means...Another Four More Years?

Republicans must be really excited these days. The Obama administration is engulfed in three "scandals" (none of which can be directly linked to the President himself). Regardless, they see blood and they are thirsty. 2016 is bound to return the White House to Republican hands. For one, as mentioned, President Obama is engulfed in "scandals." Second, history is our guide--can you name many times when one of the two parties held onto the White House for more than eight years? The last time that happened was twenty years ago. (Although, technically, with Al Gore's popular vote victory in 2000, it actually wasn't too long ago.) So it's just about guaranteed that Republicans will win in 2016, no matter what. Right?

Well, maybe not. Unfortunately for them, as of now, things aren't looking too good.



1. Demographics are seriously against them.  

In a little-noticed article from Nate Silver, he presented an interactive electoral map of the U.S. from 2016 to 2048. Readers can adjust the levels of new voters, assuming an immigration reform amnesty bill were to be passed. As you can see, if you start off at 50-50 (50% of unauthorized immigrants who become citizens and 50% who vote), then the map is identical to President Obama's 2012 victory.



But let's say you're a pessimist and assume no bill will pass and the roughly 12 million undocumented workers will remain that way. Surely the Republicans are projected to do better, right?

Nope. As you can see, even if it's 0-0, the map is the same. Republicans may be concerned about their electoral chances with or without an immigration bill, but even if there is none, assuming demographic behavior stays constant, the Republicans are in a huge amount of long-term trouble.

How about 2048? Even if no immigration reform bill is passed, Democrats are projected to increase their electoral victories by more than forty votes! Now the blue spreads to North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. And what if some sort of immigration reform is passed?

Wow. Texas--Texas--is blue.   

As you can see, demographics are changing. The Republican base (older white voters) is decreasing while the Democratic base (minorities) is increasing. Beyond that, there was a damning report this week about the GOP's perception among younger voters, who overwhelmingly voted for President Obama in both elections and are still not impressed by the Republicans. How do young Americans view the GOP?  "Close-minded," "old-fashioned," "racist," and Latino voters believe that the Republicans "couldn't care less about them." On the economy: "We've become the party that will pat you on the back when you make it, but won't offer you a hand to help you get there."

Republicans need to change--asap--if they want to start winning presidential elections again.     

2. Even without demographics, they might be in trouble.

The best book about presidential history and campaigns is Allan Lichtman's The Keys to the White House. It details a model he developed with a Russian earthquake science to predict which party would win the White House based on an analysis of every presidential election from 1860 to 1980. Their track record? From 1984 to 2012, the model accurately predicted the winner every single time. The way it works is there are thirteen statements (or "keys") regarding the economy, foreign policy, incumbent/opponent charisma, etc. None of the keys have anything to do with debates, commercials, or anything like that. If the statement is false, the key goes against the incumbent party. Six false keys means the incumbent party loses. For example, look at the 2012 race. Key 2 states that "there is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination." For 2012, this was obviously true, so it worked in President Obama's favor. For 2008, most keys worked against the incumbent Republicans.  

For 2016, as of now, I predict five false keys will be against the Democrats--1, 3, 7, 11, and 12--one short of the Republicans winning. That being said, if I'm correct that those five will be false, then all it takes is one tiny key to turn false for a Republican win, according to Lichtman's model. It's true that there could be a serious battle between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but I doubt they will challenge each other. It's obvious that with Democrats, Biden is liked but Hillary is loved, and therefore, most Democrats are keeping their fingers crossed that she is the nominee. (Regardless, Key 12 regarding incumbent charisma will likely go against them; they're both fairly likable and great campaigners, but they don't have the charisma of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, or Barack Obama.)

3. For yet a third cycle, Republicans have mediocre candidates. 

Other than Marco Rubio, I can't see any of the possible Republican nominees being formidable. Because Chris Christie did the oh-so-un-Republican thing of being respectful to President Obama, he certainly won't be the nominee. (His recent moves regarding a replacement for the late Frank Lautenberg have done him no favors.) Bobby Jindal? He still hasn't recovered from national missteps. Rand Paul is still too extreme for the country and even for the Republican nomination. The Democrats should only fear Rubio, the Republican Obama.    

4. The economy is improving.

Facts are facts. At the beginning of President Obama's term, when he and his team hadn't even located the light switches yet, jobs were hemorrhaging by a horrifying 800,000 a month. For the past two years, however, the economy has been adding jobs. Additionally, our deficits are shrinking, and in April, the U.S. government ran a $113 billion surplus. (Obama's immediate predecessor, by the way, inherited a $5 trillion surplus and turned it into an $8 trillion deficit.) The problem with our shrinking deficits is that while we may be celebrating now, we are actually doing deficit reduction entirely the wrong way. While deficits are decreasing now, causing a drag on our economy, they are projected to increase again by the end of the decade. Essentially, we've found ways to do short-term fixes (sequestration, letting all the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthiest) but not long-term (health care costs, letting the Bush tax cuts expire). This may or may not help the Republicans in 2016.  
  

For the record, if I were forced to bet today about who would win in 2016, I would bet that it would be the Republicans. As everyone knows, it's very rare for a party to hold onto the White House for more than eight years. That being said, instead of numerous variables working in their favor, only some of them are. If they do want to win, they better step it up as well as hope President Obama's second term is less successful than his first term. Republicans have lost the past five out of six presidential elections. At this rate, they may lose the next eight.

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No, Harry Truman Would Not Be a Republican

I am only 24 years old, but I have heard a lot of stupid things in my lifetime. Perhaps none of them is as stupid as when I was told that "Harry Truman would be a Republican if he were alive today."

Most Americans would recognize Truman to be the president who succeeded his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt upon Roosevelt's death, dropped the bombs on Japan and ended World War II, and led the United States into the Korean War. Since the latter two events center on war, perhaps that is why we are told Truman would be a Republican: Truman was hawkish on war issues, ready to fight the Communists in Korea as well as provide Marshall Plan aid to countries like Turkey, Greece, and Germany after World War II. And Truman was so hawkish that he dropped the atomic bombs on Japan and never apologized for it.

It's true that Truman risked his legacy and arguably his soul by his war actions, but he was also thought of as considerably soft on Communism. He was a frequent target of Joseph McCarthy, and in 1949 when the Communists took over China (even though there was absolutely nothing Truman could do about it), Truman was blamed for "losing China."

Conservatives frequently lecture us on how the president (who happens to be the Commander-in-Chief) must always follow the advice of his generals. It was Truman who fired General MacArthur, and as one newspaper put it, never before had a man so popular been fired by a man so unpopular. But historians have vindicated Truman for this, noting that it was at the very least a reminder to the military that control over it rests in the Oval Office, and Truman watched MacArthur, whom he referred to as a "dumb son of a bitch" and who disobeyed his orders during the Korean War, destroy his mythical status in front of Congressional committees. (The situation all sounds similar to President Obama firing General McCrystal.)

On domestic issues as well, Truman was very un-Republican. As a senator he voted for Roosevelt's New Deal programs completely, even supporting FDR during the controversial "Court-packing" debate. In the Senate and as President, he repeatedly and viciously attacked corporate greed and special interests. President Truman tried to pass his own socialistic programs, called the Fair Deal, which were opposed by Republicans, who overrode his veto to curtail the power of unions. Only one of his programs was adopted by Congress. Truman was even the first president to propose (wait for it...) universal health care, which Republicans labeled "socialized medicine." So if modern-day Republicans have finally adopted a pro-health care platform by embracing Truman, then that's fine with me.

Truman famously was projected to lose the 1948 election to Thomas Dewey. Remember that famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline? Truman raced around the country to "give 'em hell" and rally against the "do nothing" Republican Congress. Congressional Republicans were so shocked and angry at Truman's surprise victory that they were determined to ruin the remainder of Truman's presidency, and they did. Truman left office with an approval rating in the 20s, which was, until George W. Bush, the lowest Gallup approval rating for a president.

Truman was born and raised a Democrat, as most Missourians were, but he was a liberal one as well. He risked numerous elections by supporting black issues, was the first president to speak before the NAACP, and desegregated the military. I am not suggesting that Republicans are racist, but they certainly are opposed to the modern-day civil rights issue: queer rights. They cling to whatever religious or traditional opposition to not only same-sex marriage but most Congressional Republicans also opposed Obama's move to end the banning of gays, lesbians and bisexuals from serving in the military.

Hell, Truman even blamed the failing of his clothes store before he became a politician on the economic policies of the Harding administration.

So if any Republican could explain to me exactly why they firmly believe that this socialist hippy of a President is their kind of Democrat, so much so that by today's standards he's a Republican, I would love to hear it.

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Outrage

There is a respectable person speaking about himself being so respectable in the opening moments of Kirby Dick's "Outrage." This "respectable person" "doesn't do those things." The respectable person is Larry Craig. Those things are gay things.

Larry Craig, in case one has forgotten, is the former senator of the state of Idaho (a state where, like Iran, there are no gay people). He had famously said that Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal was a "naughty boy." Craig, despite having a solidly anti-gay voting record during his career in Congress and a preacher of all those family values things, was the man who was arrested in a Minneapolis airport for soliciting gay sex in a male restroom. Defending himself as having a "wide stance" to explain the way his foot stretched into the other stall to call for fun, he became partly a laughing stock, partly another sex scandal, but mostly the face of a disturbing hypocrisy among closeted politicians. The hypocrisy is obviously the call to discriminate against gay people and simultaneously lead a gay lifestyle.

Craig is the obvious target. Also discussed are Charlie Crist, Ed Schrock, David Dreier, Jim McCrery and Ed Koch. These are men who largely have refused to support issues regarding HIV/AIDS, hate crimes, gays in the military, gay adoption and gay marriage, among others. Crist is the example that is really troubling, particularly because of the Macbeth-style ambition of the man. Crist, of course, has been in the news lately--he is the sitting governor of Florida who is also running for the Senate. When it appeared that Marco Rubio, the Tea Party favorite, would defeat Crist in the Republican primary, Crist abandoned the Republicans (becoming more common among moderates these days) and created a three-man race. Crist had also apparently offered his endorsement to Rudy Giuliani for president, and then when it became likely that McCain would win Florida and the possibility arose for Crist to be a front-runner for the vice-president nomination, Crist changed his mind and endorsed McCain (and he didn't call Giuliani to let him know). Inconveniently, though, Crist was single, and of course a single man cannot make it to such a high position. The McCain campaign, according to the documentary, already with so many hindrances and distractions and shortcomings, could not afford to defend their man as a straight man (so they picked Palin, who was facing ethics violations and could barely make a coherent sentence). Conveniently but in vein, Crist married six weeks before the vice-president nominee was chosen.

Barney Frank points out in the film that in 1976, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were about even on gay rights. Since then, Democrats have gotten better (passing the Matthew Shepard Act and poised to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell) and Republicans have gotten much, much worse (leading calls of hatred to ban same-sex marriage mostly on the grounds of firing up their base). Former representative Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona, is interviewed and discusses telling John McCain that he is gay, to which McCain immediately stated something along the lines of, "Jim, it's okay. I know. You're a good legislator, and it makes no difference to me." McCain, of course, is the man who said several years ago that he would support repealing DADT if the military approached him offering their support of the repeal. Now that the Commander-in-Chief (the commander of the military), the Secretary of Defense (who incidentally served the role in both a Democratic and Republican administration), and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all have supported a repeal, McCain has for whatever lack of logic changed his mind.

Ninety percent of these cases are Republican, and a section of the film discusses Dreier, who was denied a leadership position in the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives because he was too "moderate." The famous Barney Frank quote goes that, "Yes, in the sense that I marched in the 'moderate' pride parade last summer and went to a 'moderate' bar." Washington in the film is called gayer than San Francisco, but much more in the closet.

But these discussions are sparked by the film but do not really offer an evaluation of the film, so here it is: This is a very good documentary. Dick, just as he did with his brilliant "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," is asking common-sense questions and being met with absurd answers and realities. The film's flaw is that it seems to be unbalanced in its emotions, such as when it provided a catharsis of gay politicians explaining the freedom of coming out, then shifting again to the hypocritical nature of those remaining in the closet.

"Outrage" raises the analogy of anti-gay bully who happens to be gay--he behaves this way to exemplify the image that he is obviously not gay, for no gay man would hate himself and those like him. As Bill Maher said, "hating yourself is the greatest love of all."

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