Nov 26, 2004  |  By: KEITH BOYKIN  | COMMENTS     

ON WEDNESDAY, NOV. 3, I did something I had never done after a presidential election: I turned off the television.

I stopped watching the news, I stopped listening to the radio, I stopped reading the papers, and I stopped logging onto Internet news sites.

For a full week, I let go of politics and started thinking about other things. Not surprisingly, I was remarkably happy while everyone around me seemed depressed.

I heard friends talk about moving to Canada. I got e-mails from people suggesting that the blue states secede from the union. A lot of people talked about creating two separate countries.

My favorite suggestion was unlikely, but it seemed effective. If all the progressive voters in the south simply moved to Florida and Georgia, we could completely take over those two states. Who needs Kentucky and South Carolina anyway?

THOSE IDEAS WERE fascinating, but they are not the solution. I’ve worked on six political campaigns, and I know you don’t give up when you lose one battle.

I lost races in ‘82, ‘84, ‘86, ‘88 and ‘89 and finally found a winner in 1992 with Bill Clinton. I didn’t need a television pundit to tell me to keep fighting after losing an election.

I would have continued my self-imposed media blackout indefinitely, but I had to give a speech about the election at the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force’s Creating Change conference in St. Louis recently.

I also had to moderate an election panel at UCLA Law School and I was scheduled to attend the opening of the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock in the same week.

I canceled my trip to Arkansas because I did not want to sit around a bunch of despondent Democrats, and I was a little wary of speaking at the Creating Change conference as well.

What I found in St. Louis was refreshingly different. LGBT activists were not depressed; they were fired up and ready to continue the struggle.

They knew that the election was simply a battle in the larger war for the soul of America. They knew that this was not the time to surrender. They knew they had to go back home and fight.

MAYBE THIS WAS a wake-up call. John Kerry was the most LGBT-friendly Democratic presidential nominee in history, but he was not our savior.

We made the mistake of assuming Bill Clinton would be our savior in 1992 and we quickly learned otherwise.

The truth is that our response to the election should be the same regardless of who wins the presidency. In 1992, we sat back and expected the president to do the heavy lifting. Today we know we have to do the work ourselves.

We have to develop a proactive left-wing agenda of our own, not just a reactive agenda that responds to right-wing attacks.

We need to articulate our own positive vision of America that goes beyond identity politics and puts the other side on the defensive.

We cannot afford an “either-or” strategy that forces us to choose between national politics or local politics. We have to be engaged in both areas.

We have to fight with every weapon in our arsenal — from the streets, to the school board, to the boardroom, to the courtroom, to the court of public opinion. And we can’t give up just because we lose an election.

Our day will come, when we make it come. And soon, our opponents will be the ones turning off the television.