Allow me to share your enthusiasm for the new administration. I do remember how I felt when Bill Clinton was inaugurated. There were open gays and lesbians working in the OEOB and in the West Wing. Our deliverer had come.

There were friends - some native to Arkansas - who admonished us that this man was a pragmatic triangulating centrist - who had found a way to remain a "Democrat" while functioning like a neoliberal or moderate Republican.

Three years into the first term, I understood perfectly. Clinton was more comfortable with Gingrich in the speaker's chair than the gentleman from Washington state who was defeated for re-election in 1994. The GOP Congress and President Clinton remade the "welfare as we knew it", cut regulations for banks and other financial houses, passed DOMA to go with DADT, and passed the Telecommunications Act, providing the corporations and right wing with the tools to control and edit the national debate.

LGBT leaders were leaving the White House. In 1996, Mr. Clinton merely looked toward his betrayed base and said, " Where else can you go but with me."  He was right. There was no one who would do us any good, but Bill Clinton would do us " as much harm as the neocons wanted to do - enshrine hate in the US Constitution.

Now, President-elect Obama is a man whom I have supported with my eyes open and my heart shielded. He has been a centrist and makes no statements that he is a liberal. He is yet another neo-liberal who always seek to compromise with the neo-conservative opposition.

A good example was Proposition Hate. He told the Saddleback Preacher about the time of his TIME cover that he believed that marriage was between  "one man and one woman," and that he was opposed to Proposition 8. That statement made the black fundamentalist Christian vote for Obama and Yes on 8.

I still believe that he will pass Matthew Shepard.....under the "incrementalism" canard accepted by gentrified groups like HRC.
It is an old political trick.....give them the easiest and sexiest piece of legislation they want....one with legs....and then provide them nothing else but rhetoric and crocodile tears about lack of votes to pass it.

You then tell the neo-conservative base in the Congressional GOP Conference that the Democratic Caucus will not ask for anything else if they help pass this sop to their LGBT base.

I was active in liberal MA GOP politics as a teenager.....and then became a Democrat in 1968  (and married a Canadian Liberal in 1976....well, partnered him....and married him in 2003)....and I think that I understand politics after forty years of both activity and observation.