HRC Back Story

The response to the news about the Presidential forum has been quite amazing.  We're continuing to work out the details and have some updates.

We learned today that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will be attending the forum.  Still waiting to hear from Governor Richardson....

We did make an effort to have a Republican debate as well.   The Foundation's first ground rule was that we needed to get confirmations from at least two of the top three candidates on either side before we'd proceed with any forum.  On the GOP side, Mitt Romney said no -- and we never heard back from Rudy Giuliani or John McCain.  That's right: no response. Furthermore, none of the Republican presidential candidates returned HRC's questionnaire. Without any responses from any of the top three Republicans, there would obviously be no GOP debate.

Once we received affirmative responses from Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, we proceeded with working with LOGO to plan the Democratic forum.   Then, John Edwards also said yes. 

The other standard we set was that the candidates we invited had to have raised $100,000.  On the Democratic side, that meant we also invited Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Joe Biden, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Gov. Bill Richardson.   We wanted to make sure that with the limited time we had to present this forum, our community got to hear from candidates who could actually be President.  We have gotten some feedback about not inviting Mike Gravel.  Unfortunately, he didn't meet the $100,000 threshold. 

Knowing this event is the only forum that will be devoted solely to questions about GLBT issues, we put a lot of thought into how we can maximize the response time from the candidates who could win their party's nomination.  We really want to do the best thing for the community and make this forum as productive as possible.

In addition to Joe Solmonese and Melissa Etheridge, there will be a moderator at the event.  We've got asks in to several top-tier journalists to serve as moderator and we'll have more updates on this as soon as possible.

One last thing:  We're working with LOGO to set up a process for the Foundation to solicit questions for the candidates from the GLBT community.  More details on that soon.