Jun 01, 2007  |  By: KEVIN NAFF  | COMMENTS     

LONGTIME DEMOCRATIC strategist Bob Shrum drops a bombshell in his much-anticipated new book, according to media reports.

In it, he claims he asked former Sen. John Edwards at the outset of his 1998 Senate campaign, “What is your position, Mr. Edwards, on gay rights?”

“I’m not comfortable around those people,” was Edwards’ reply, according to Shrum.

To say the denials last week from Edwards’ camp are unconvincing would be a gross understatement.

Harrison Hickman, Edwards’ pollster, whom the Washington Post says was in the room at the time he made the remarks, claims that Shrum, “is sensationalizing and taking out of context what was an honest discussion about [Edwards’] lack of exposure to these issues and openly gay people. I don’t remember anything that expressed any kind of venom or judgment about gay people.”

Eric Schultz, an Edwards spokesperson, says Shrum is more interested in selling books than in the truth.

But Edwards’ people don’t deny the accuracy of the quote; it was conveniently “taken out of context,” they say.

“Those people?”

Does he mean the same people whose money and votes he’s been trying to win since 2003?

Edwards’ record on gay issues has always been a rather mixed bag and now we finally see why: he’s simply not comfortable around us. That’s a typical feeling among the inarticulate, unsophisticated masses who can’t justify their narrow-minded views and so fall back on the “icky” defense.

What exactly does Edwards think we’ll do to him behind closed doors? Wrestle him to the floor and have our way with him? (Those piercing eyes! That golden tan! The feathered hair!)

What’s particularly galling about this revelation is that in April, Edwards became the first presidential candidate to release a list of prominent gay supporters. The list includes a number of longtime activists, politicians and Hollywood types. I guess he got over his discomfort long enough to collect campaign contributions from “those people.”

EDWARDS RECENTLY REITERATED his cowardly position on same-sex marriage, claiming he supports “partnership benefits,” whatever that means, but that it’s a “jump” for him to get to marriage.

Actually, if you support the “partnership benefits” that the state and federal governments bestow on married couples, then it’s not a “jump” at all; you’re already there, just too spineless to say so in public. Of course, he’s in good company in the Democratic field on that count.

Such double-speak and evasion are typical of Edwards. He’s frequently been absent when gay voters could have used his voice. For example, during the July 2004 congressional debate over a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Senate rejected the amendment in a 50-48 vote. The only senators absent during the vote? Edwards and running mate Sen. John Kerry. How convenient.

Edwards does seem to have an attendance problem when it comes to gay events. In July 2003, seven of nine Democratic presidential candidates addressed a first-of-its-kind forum sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign. You guessed it, Edwards was one of the two no-shows.

There were about 500 people, mostly gay, in the audience (including me). I guess that’s too many of “those people” in the room for his comfort.

Edwards scored a 66 out of 100 on HRC’s congressional scorecard for the 108th Congress. Where I went to school, that’s a big fat “D.”

In 2004, Edwards raised eyebrows for remarks he made about the “values debate.”

He criticized Howard Dean for advocating a strategy of winning votes in the South by forcing the debate beyond “guns, God and gays.”

“Some in my party want to duck the values debate,” Edwards said. “They want to say to America, ‘We’re not interested in your values; we want to change the subject to anything else.’ That’s wrong,” he said. “You can’t tell voters what to believe or what to vote on. Where I come from, voters are looking for answers, not attitude.”

The comments were rightly viewed at the time as a thinly veiled attempt to distance himself from gay rights in the run-up to Southern primaries.

SINCE LAST WEEK, when the Edwards comment was made public, his supporters have gone into damage-control mode, parroting the predictable line that the remark is nearly 10 years old and we ought to move on.

But that argument doesn’t hold water. First, 1998 wasn’t so long ago and there’s no indication that he changed his opinion right away. Second, presidential candidates shouldn’t be allowed to simply wave off extreme or controversial statements and positions that were made in the not-so-distant past. Just as conservative Republican voters won’t let Mitt Romney forget about his 1994 pledge to ...