Longshot presidential candidate Fred Karger hopes to push LGBT rights to forefront of GOP politics

Fred Karger is not your typical Republican presidential candidate. He has never held elected office, spending his life behind the scenes as a consultant for other candidates. When questioned on policy issues he will readily admit when he is unsure and needs further research. And there’s the 800 lb. elephant in the room that will define his candidacy: He’s running as an openly gay man in the Republican Party.

TAI spent two afternoons with Karger last week when he was in Washington, D.C., for the Victory Fund’s Gay and Lesbian Leadership Conference. While Karger’s chances of gaining the 2012 nomination may be slim, he could play an outsized role during the nomination cycle. Much in the way that Ron Paul challenged doctrinaire Republican views during the 2008 Republican campaign, Karger could serve as the alternative voice during debates that forces other candidates to face issues they may rather avoid.

Karger is a long shot candidate by any definition of the term. He holds low name recognition, does not fundraise at the same level as other potential candidates and will face difficulty winning over any socially conservative voters. His qualifying experience comes not from elected office but from his career as a political consultant; he has worked on numerous campaigns, including Ronald Reagan’s presidential bids, and he was a senior executive at The Dolphin Group, a consulting firm most famous for creating the Willie Horton ads in the 1988 presidential campaign.

He may not stand much of a chance of winning, but Karger is the closest thing to an official candidate in the field at this point. He has a presidential exploratory committee, and made headlines recently when he began airing ads in Iowa — a full 14 months before caucus day. He is making his tenth visit to New Hampshire this week and has been to Iowa five times throughout the year, only trailing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Iowa appearances.

Karger’s current ambitions are focused solely on proving his initial viability as a candidate in order to qualify for the nomination debates next year. “I’ll do whatever it takes to put pressure on these debate organizers, and I’ll pick my battles,” Karger said.

“I had two goals for this year: one was to satisfy the leadership,” he said, discussing the leaders of the LGBT rights movement who he hopes will support his campaign. “I had to prove that I was serious because everybody said, ‘oh it’s a stunt’, which is a natural assumption with my personality and background, but it’s not. And number two, [to show] that I am credible. A lot harder to prove, but I think I’ve accomplished it with the kind of attention I’ve gotten and the devotion [to traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire].”

No matter what Karger says about — or how others perceive — his presidential run, he is aware of the reality that his candidacy would largely revolve around forcing other Republicans to address gay rights. “If I do nothing else, to kind of make this issue, to put a face on this issue as opposed to what happened in previous elections like 2004 where the gay community was getting used as a political tool to strengthen the president’s reelection,” he said. “If I can do that I’ll have done quite a bit.”

He hopes his candidacy can help other generations of LGBT individuals feel comfortable with their identity. Karger largely stayed in the closet throughout his consulting career. He lived a double life, spending his days organizing campaigns for conservative politicians, but in his personal life, supporting gay rights activism.

He recounted one incident early in his career that taught him the importance of keeping his identity hidden in his professional life. In 1978, he made a political contribution to the No on Prop 6 campaign, a measure which would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in California public schools.

“I took it upon myself, I’m 28 years old, I’m working for the Republican conservative running for attorney general by day, and by night, I’m helping the Republican’s opposition,” Karger said. “And I wrote a check for $100 … to this campaign. It was to get the sponsorship of the Los Angles County Young Republicans.”

He did not disclose that donation to his Republican employers at the time, but the contribution became public through campaign finance disclosures after the campaign. Two years later, that contribution came back to haunt Karger when he was working on the Senate primary for a conservative Republican candidate Ray Hanzlik.

“Ray got a letter from one of my detractors from the Young Republicans, saying ‘how can you have someone like this working for you who supports the homosexual agenda,’ and had a copy of the campaign [donation] page that had my name in there, and then a couple newspaper stories about the event and the Young Republicans,” Karger said. “He [Hanzlik] just throws this down on my desk and says ‘you should know who your enemy is, this doesn’t affect me one iota, but I want you to have it.’ And I still have it. It really sent a chilling effect on me and kept me — I never gave another contribution of $100 or more, since that’s the [reporting] threshold, for many years. It kept me more in the closet I think. It scared the hell out of me, because I could easily be fired. It’s difficult situation in Republican politics to this day.”

Karger did not come out to the general political world until after he retired from his position at The Dolphin Group in 2004, fully investing his time to gay rights activism. Through Californians Against Hate — the group he founded to work against Proposition 8 — Karger has been at the forefront of opposing the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and linking anti-gay funding to the Mormon Church. He has organized boycotts of businesses that contributed to anti-same-sex marriage campaigns and filed frequent complaints to force these campaigns to disclose their sources of funding.

As he has switched from an activist into a potential candidate, Karger has turned his attention to pushing for the repeal of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which bans openly gay citizens from serving in the U.S. armed forces.

“This is kind of a political football that people’s lives are being tossed around, 14,000 people have already been discharged under “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” it costs $355 million for the government, so it’s ridiculous. It’s discriminatory, the president should have done it with a stroke of the pen and not be enforcing it,” he said. “I fault Republicans in the Senate because I think there was a breakthrough with some of the moderates who were willing to do the right thing and they’re unfortunately tied to the leadership.”

The focus of his potential campaign may be primarily directed at LGBT civil liberties, but Karger would challenge the other presidential candidates on a host of other issues if he qualifies for the nomination debates.

He could create headaches for current frontrunner Mitt Romney. “I fully embrace his Romneycare for Massachusetts,” Karger said when asked if he agrees with the former Massachusetts governor on any issues. Karger opposed the federal health-care reform bill but said he supports state-based systems such as the measure Romney shepherded through as governor, which was substantively the same as the national bill.

His policy views are certainly unique among Republican ideology. Karger, a longtime member of Republican Majority for Choice, is staunchly pro-choice.

“There are no moderate voices out there; there are no other possible potential candidates who are even pro-choice. Even some of the libertarians are not,” Karger said. “I think that is extremely important, a major Republican issue. To me keeping government out of people’s private lives, that’s a basic tenet of the Republican Party.”

Karger breaks ranks from the party platform on a number of other issues as well. He gives lip service to the general conservative principles of smaller government and a strong national defense, but when he is forced to discuss specifics, there are few moments where he would agree with the rest of the field’s stated positions. He opposes Obama’s troop expansion in Afghanistan and advocates for removing soldiers from the ground while using advance military technology from a distance instead.

If he were in the White House today, Karger would extend the Bush tax cuts for one year, but he is unsure what he would prefer in the long term (these comments were made prior to the deal reached between the Obama administration and Senate Republicans Monday night). However, he does not share the zeal of his fellow Republicans for tax cuts for the rich. “I’m not for giving tax relief to the super rich,” he says. As to Republican claims that the $250,000 annual income marker is too low to describe a family as rich, Karger said, “it’s not exactly middle class.”

As for what Karger would do to help stimulate the economy and restart jobs he only offers vague comments about being an optimistic figure in the White House who would encourage consumers to get out and spend money again. He would like to cut down on government bureaucracy, but is unable to name anything specific. “The issue area is newer to me,” he said, but explains that he has been meeting with experts in various fields to bolster his credentials while he is still in the “exploratory” phase of the campaign.

Karger’s willingness to admit when he does not have enough information is notably refreshing in a landscape where politicians are prepared to spin any question lobbed their way. But this very attribute that is charming in a one-on-one situation would damage any possible sense of legitimacy if it continued through presidential debate appearances. He could run circles around people speaking on LGBT civil rights issues, but the seasoned campaign veterans he would face have honed messages on any major policy points.

Beyond expanding his ability to respond to the issues of the day, Karger faces a number of challenges in order to be seen as a viable presidential candidate. However, his consulting experience may give him an edge in conducting a headline-grabbing campaign necessary to boost name recognition as an underdog candidate.

“I need to be creative and I need to do things very differently,” he said. Different is definitely one way to describe his strategy to date. His campaign hands out swag — including frisbees — that is covered with “Fred Who?” a direct acknowledgment of the fact that he is currently unrecognizable to voters. He has already begun running ads in New Hampshire and Iowa, likely far before any other candidate will enter the airwaves

“Normally, you’ve got to be a little cautious in a campaign, but when you’re a longshot you generally throw caution out the window; what do you have to lose?

“I got a lot of my inspiration on a lot of what I’ve done, like announcing [his possible candidacy] in New Orleans, like this [ad] from David Plouffe, because in that book he said we have nothing to lose so we took chances,” Karger said. Plouffe served as Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, and his book “The Audacity to Win” has been described by many as an instructive manual on how to wage an insurgent campaign (even Newt Gingrich gave the book credit recently).

Fundraising will be the largest hurdle to overcome for a Karger campaign to gain any traction. “That’s languishing, and I’ve not really asked, I’ve not done what I’m about to do. I wanted to wait until the midterms were over and now the holidays,” he sayid. “After the first of the year is when I’m going to start doing that. It’s my least favorite part of it. Again, I have to prove that I’m serious, because why would people contribute to what looks like Fred going around and riding in parades and doing all this.”

He has set his sights significantly below the figures other candidates are likely to spend, but his preliminary budget still requires a high sum. “It’s a modest budget by presidential candidates, but it is a hell of a lot of money, $5 or $6 million. But I can do my two state strategy initially and I can make a big impact.”