Magiver, have you ever heard of the office of Vice President?
Yes, and it’s included in the vote for President. Vice Presidents have little political power. Senators are the next most powerful elected position followed by Members of Congress.
Keep this in context. My post was in response to the idea that Senators were not prominent politicians. They are very prominent in the Unites States.
Yes, the consensus of this thread will come as a disappointment to Joe Biden.
And how quickly we forget: The Onion | America's Finest News Source.
You’re right but in the context of what I was responding too I thought the process of election was more relevant to the concept of holding public office while openly gay. After President, the next highest office would be the 2 houses of Congress. Senators are considered having a consolidation of power because in most states there are more Congressmen.
I never understood why cabinet seats are considered a powerful position but they are. It would make a good debate topic.
Joe Biden’s job is to say as little as possible so as to avoid tripping over his tongue.
Barney Frank would be the most well known and powerful openly gay politician at this point. And in his position as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he is pretty powerful, even though a lot of people don’t know who he is. Honestly, I doubt he would trade his senority and position in the House for any higher office. He can do a lot more where he is.
There have been other openly gay members of Congress, Jim Kolbe, Steve Gunderson, Gerry Studds, Jared Polis and others who came out after they left office like Foley. Governor McGreevey probably could have come out and stayed in office. But his admission and resignation were prompted by ethics concerns over his partner’s appointment as State Homeland Security Director and subsequent sexual harrassment lawsuit.
Its not unforseeable that an openly gay candidate can be elected as a governor in the near future. But we don’t have guys like Peter Mandelson who are sort of career cabinet ministers/party apparatchiks. In the States, you can’t do what he does by keeping an MPs seat warm while you go off and serve in various cabinet positions.
People win a seat in the House and then stay there for many years building their power bases. They win Senate seats and try for President once then go hang out in the Senate. In most cases, if a member of Congress wants to run for higher office (other than President), they are giving up their old seat. So if they lose for higher office, they are out of politics until they find something else to run for. So there is a bit of a disincentive to continuously moving around to different positions.
There’s a possibility that David Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, will run for Governor of New Hampshire in 2010. I think he’s denied it, but it’s still a possibility.
To correct myself, David Cicilline might run for governor of Rhode Island, not New Hampshire.
I think there is real doubt whether Hoover was gay e.g see wikis discussion
put into not proven basket
NZ: gay politician = big meh here. 
I think we currently have 6 or so openly gay members of parliament (out of 120 total)… and have had a fair few over the years, along with the world’s first openly transsexual Member of Parliament, Georgina Beyer.
I’m not sure who the first NZ MP known to be gay was; Marilyn Waring got “outed” by a local rag back in 1976, but didn’t come out until '85 – but even back then it was more felt to be a private issue and not something to make political fodder out of.
The next governor of South Carolina may be gay. Then again, maybe not: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/03/sanford-accused-of-smear-campaign-against-bauer/#more-67194
There were a lot of rumors the Florida governor is gay, last year he married a trophy type wife. Some say that was his way of shutting down those rumors.
There are three openly homosexual members of Congress at the moment:
Barney Frank (D-MA)
Jared Polis (D-CO)
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
They appear to be the highest-level openly homosexual politicians in the U.S. at the moment.
FWIW, the Head of the Office of Personnel Management is the highest-ranked gay official in the Executive Branch (both currently and I believe, ever).
Has there ever been an openly gay Senator? None come to mind, and I haven’t seen any mentioned.
My gaydar goes way off the chart for the ***current ***governor of SC.
How many people knew Peter Mandleson was the UK gov’s No2?
Ok, so maybe ‘behind the scenes’. x
I suspect very few people in the US have even heard of Peter Mandelson. Hell I live in London and try to follow politics and even though he is clearly the second most powerful politician in the country, I still couldn’t tell you what his job is (read his entry and try to tell me what it is).
In terms of him being gay, it’s not that high in the public consciousness even over here, he keeps it fairly quiet and the media generally avoids mentioning it. There was a famous incident back in 1998 where a gay journalist outed Mandelson for the first time live on TV. Mandelson somehow managed to get the head of the BBC to ban any mention of his homosexuality on their service. So that week there was a hilarious episode of a comedy news quiz show on the BBC called Have I Got News For You where the big story of the day was clearly Peter Mandelson’s sexuality, but since they’d been banned from mentioning it, the panellists instead skirted around the issue with clear references to it. It kind of fell apart when Ian Hislop said, “Peter Mandelson? Isn’t he a hom…owner?” and Paul Merton replied, “well what’s wrong with gay people owning homes?”. 
“Openly” is probably the key word here. Although her office has refused to comment, this article from 2004 details efforts to “out” Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski. According to several people I know on Capitol Hill, it’s a widely discussed, bordering-on-fact article of faith that Senator Mikulski is gay.
But she’s never said it publicly, so far as I know.
Mark “Hiking The Appalachian Trail” Sanford ?!?
Really?
Yeah, usually that type doesn’t go off and have a heterosexual affair. They get caught in bathrooms tapping feet or their emails to their hustler date get sent to the wrong person. I mean, it’s POSSIBLE that Sanford set up an elaborate hoax involving people in two different and widely separated countries in order to throw people off the scent of his REAL scandal, but it’s VERY unlikely.