Obama Campaign Holds Policy Briefing on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

The Barack Obama campaign held a conference call Wednesday aimed at contrasting the senator's support for repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with John McCain’s belief in maintaining the ban against gays and lesbians serving openly in the Armed Forces.

“John McCain does not believe that our military personnel are as professional as the 23 other NATO countries that allow their military members to serve openly,” said Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, who emerged as a fervent straight ally for repealing the ban in July at the first congressional hearings held on the policy since 1993. “As many of you know, they did adopt a platform -- John McCain and Sarah Palin -- that emphasized the incompatibility of homosexuality within the military service.”

The GOP platform asserts, “To protect our servicemen and women and ensure that America’s Armed Forces remain the best in the world, we affirm the timelessness of those values, the benefits of traditional military culture, and the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service.”

The Democratic platform, by contrast, calls for an end to the policy in the name of military preparedness: “We support the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and the implementation of policies to allow qualified men and women to serve openly regardless of sexual orientation.”

Without calling the 72-year-old McCain by name, retired Lt. General Claudia Kennedy noted a generational difference in perspective on being gay. “We're in the generation of soldiers who don't think this is nearly as important as some of the people who are from a much older generation,” the 60-year-old Kennedy said of the group of Obama surrogates on the conference call.

Kennedy, the first woman to reach the rank of a three-star general, added that Sen. Joseph Lieberman -- a strong McCain supporter -- and the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, retired General John Shalikashvili, have both said the “outmoded” policy should be changed.

“There’s just no question in my mind that we ought to look at the entire talent pool,” she said, in relation to recruitment. “We should not be artificially limiting who we look at as a potential soldier.”

Some reporters raised questions about whether Obama’s support for reinstating the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) programs on college campuses nationwide -- some colleges expelled ROTC programs during the tumult of the Vietnam War -- was in conflict with his commitment to ending “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Many campuses continue to ban military recruitment of any kind based on the military’s discriminatory policy against gays.