Could You Vote for a Gay Candidate for President?

There are openly gay Democratic members of Congress, but is the GOP ready for its first out and proud presidential candidate? The Washington Post reported this week that little known openly gay Republican Fred Karger, 61, is contemplating a run for the White House and it’s unclear how his potential campaign might be received by his party.

Karger has never held elected office and is thinking about launching his campaign using the money he made as a conservative consultant that helped bring down Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in 1988 with the infamous Willie Horton ads and who fought alongside big tobacco in the 1990s to fight against smoking bans in California.

All the while, he attended gay pride parades with one eye over his shoulder on the lookout for cameras, wrote checks to LGBT causes, and, after his retirement at 53, organized a coalition to save a historic bar in his hometown of Laguna Beach and formed a nonprofit to battle California’s Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban.

In that sense, the sometime actor (“Airport 1975,” “Mad Men,” Edge shaving commercials) has some solid conservative bonafides, he’s visited bellwether state New Hampshire more than any other potential candidate and wants to be a role model to gay youth as the first ever openly gay major party presidential candidate. No one has declared their intention to run yet, but Karger has already started burning through is retirement money at a $20,000-$30,000-a-month clip, spending much of it on Frisbees and T-shirts that read “FRED WHO?”

His platform is a bit thin at this point, consisting of lowering the voting age, education reform to make school “more interesting” and a unique lane as a pro-choice, antiwar compromiser in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt. He seems realistic about his chances, but, like Rep. Ron Paul in 2008, he thinks he might be able to “crash the party” and at least challenge the other candidates on their gay rights views.

In fact, his work on the attempted Prop 8 defeat is partly the impetus for the potential presidential run, since the repeal effort on the bill will likely peak in late 2011, just as he’s already set down roots in New Hampshire and, hopefully, made inroads there with voters.

One of the biggest problems, though, according to the Post, is when he’s asked about things like balancing the budget, Karger “smiles and steers the subject back to gay marriage … When people ask him how he'd fix health care, he says ‘I still need to look into it.’”

Could you vote for a gay presidential candidate?