View From Washington

This week we learned that whether we're talking about LGBT or mainstream issues, two truisms flow throughout the White House. First, the administration finds bloggers -- which I presume can be lumped in with "the professional left" -- pesky and, occasionally, even worthy of scorn at the highest levels.

It was nearly impossible not to connect the dots between comments from press secretary Robert Gibbs last week to those that surfaced this week from LGBT liaison Brian Bond.

According to one account of an August 6 meeting between state equality advocates and the White House Office of Public Engagement, Bond "expressed frustration at the often-intense criticism levied, particularly by bloggers, against an administration that is '99 percent supportive of your issues.'"

Truth be told, Bond's comments pale in comparison to those hurled by Robert Gibbs more broadly at progressives who give voice to dissatisfaction.

"They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we've eliminated the Pentagon," Gibbs told Sam Youngman of The Hill, adding that those who claim the president bowed to centrists on issues such as health care reform "wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Kucinich, eh? Well, that would certainly solve the marriage equality issue.

Second, the White House continues to acknowledge that its message is not reaching the public and seems to be at a loss as to how to remedy the situation even as it almost willfully alienates the press.

Earlier this month I sat at a briefing listening to Gibbs say he doesn't hold the American people responsible for not knowing about the gains made in the American auto industry since Obama took office.

"Because I don't think the story has been told," Gibbs said. "I don't think that the American people knew that for the first time in 10 years we were adding jobs to the auto industry and had added 55,000 jobs since GM emerged from bankruptcy; or that for the first quarter since 2004, all three companies at the same time posted an operating profit; or that the money invested by this administration was very likely to be repaid in full."

His comment raised the question, "Well, who do you hold accountable for that information deficit?"

While I was interviewing the Equality Federation's Toni Broaddus this week about the LGBT briefing at the White House, she expressed dismay that the information conveyed at their meeting wasn't being disseminated more widely.

"We did ask, 'Why isn't the administration doing more to let people know about the things we're learning in our briefing today?'" she said. "They acknowledged that they hadn't done a good job of getting that out."

Certainly there's enough blame to go around if the public isn't aware of all the LGBT equality gains that are being made at the federal agency level, and I see the problem as threefold: one part White House, one part press, and one part public.

But Gibbs's indiscretion last week isn't the first instance of this administration taking a hostile posture toward a press corps that, quite frankly, largely praised it during the campaign and was probably predisposed to liking it initially. From a mere practical standpoint, they have also decreased access by doing fewer press briefings and only infrequent morning "gaggles." Part of this is due to the president's increased travel schedule, but certainly not all of it can be explained away.

Some of these considerations no doubt crossed Maureen Dowd's mind last week as she opened her Sunday column with "Robert Gibbs should be yanked as White House press secretary."

But of all the insights that emerged from the meeting activists attended at the White House, the most fascinating for me pertained to marriage equality -- a subject the administration would clearly harpoon if it could.

In fact, I get the distinct feeling the White House hopes it can simply duck the marriage question straight through 2012, and I'd also bet dollars to doughnuts it won't be able to. What became clear to me while interviewing attendees of the August 6 meeting was that while the friendly audience may have cut the administration some slack on legislative items like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Defense of Marriage Act, the one place advocates unapologetically stood their ground was on marriage equality.

Why? Because on that issue state activists have been the proverbial tip of the spear, if you will. They may not have a front-row seat to the maddening process of trying to chisel equality from the gut of an ossified federal government, but state-by-state they have shed blood, sweat, and tears for the recognition of their love and their families.

No one more clearly conveyed this point to me than Michael Kenny of the Florida Together Federation, who was at the White House briefing.

"We want and deserve absolute full marriage equality, and we're not going to be satisfied until the president is advocating for it himself," Kenny said. "It's heartbreaking because we fought marriage amendments here in '08 and we were really in the trenches. We made personal sacrifices for months and in some cases years, and then we watched discrimination be enshrined in the state constitution."

Make no mistake, this is an issue that the president's chief advisers have misjudged from day one. They underestimated how angry people were that candidate Barack Obama wasn't more vocal in his opposition to Proposition 8; they dismissed the devastation felt by millions of queers who poured their hearts into electing Obama only to watch Prop. 8 proponent Rick Warren give the invocation at the inauguration; they remained silent in 2009 as gay Mainers fought to preserve their right to love, marry, and build a life with their partner; and then David Axelrod reassured the nation two weeks ago that the president still opposes granting the freedom to marry to all Americans.

When Gibbs lampooned the professional left it was code for, "Oh, it's just those coastal big-city liberals pushing their intemperate views in the media again."

But that couldn't be further from the truth on the issue of marriage equality after the sting of bigotry tromped from Florida to Maine to California and nearly every state in between. The president and his advisers may hope to stay below the radar on the question of marriage straight through 2012, but they are flying blind if they can't see that activists across the nation are already seething.