Source: FiveThirtyEight.com, Politico, MoveOn.org
Nate Silver -- the super statistician who runs political website FiveThirtyEight.com -- notices an interesting change on the Obama transition team website change.gov compared to the now-legacy Obama election website BarackObama.com.

The transition site now includes what Silver characterizes as "a much broader range of commitments to the gay and lesbian community".

But a prominent progressive activist group, MoveOn.org, decided at about the same time to drop LGBT issues from its priorities for the next year.

Silver explains the changes to the pre- and post-election Obama websites:

Whereas BarackObama.com includes a couple of items of interest to the gay community -- namely, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and expanded hate-crimes statutes -- that is the extent of it. The gay and lesbian community is not mentioned explicitly -- in fact, the word 'gay' does not appear anywhere in the 'Civil Rights' section of BarackObama.com.

By contrast, the Change.gov website includes a section addressed explicitly to the gay community, and it covers not only ENDA and hate crimes, but also promises Obama's support for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, an expansion of adoption rights for gay couples, his backing of "full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples", and his opposition to a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

Obama's change.gov website makes LGBT issues more prominent, but MoveOn.org wants to move beyond them [contd.]

Silver isn't sure what to make of the change, but notes that the transition team and Obama himself might have felt more pressure to make the President-elect's own positions on LGBT issues more obvious after the outcry from progressives and LGBT activists and bloggers about the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.

One consequence of the Rick Warren controversy is that Obama may now be under a greater amount of pressure from Democrats to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, to pass ENDA, and to expand hate crimes statutes, and to do all of the above relatively quickly. As we have pointed out before, large majorities of the public are in line with the Obama position on all three issues.

But if Obama is feeling pressure from LGBT organization and some progressive groups, it became clear over the weekend that MoveOn.org will not be among the groups putting pressure on Obama and Congress to meet the commitments to LGBT equality outlined on the website.

The powerful MoveOn organization polled its massive mailing list to compile a top-10 list of issues that the group would focus on during the first year of the new administration. The list was then pared down to four issues that will become the focus of the group, Politico reports. LGBT issues didn't make the cut.

What they chose: universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy; stopping climate change; and end the war in Iraq.

What they didn't: holding the Bush administration accountable; fighting for gay rights and LGBT equality; and reforming campaigns and elections.

The LGBT equality issue came in eighth on the top-10 list with only 8.6 percent of the group's membership choosing it as a vital issue for the group, according to the MoveOn's poll results.

"Parties become much more pragmatic when they’ve won," Joe Trippi told Politico. He heads the media firm Trippi Multimedia and managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and advised John Edwards in 2008.

"At least in the initial stages, they're going to try to work together [with Obama] to see what parts of their agenda they can get through," he says. And they recognize, he adds, that they will get more of their agenda passed if they don't start trouble when they don't need to.

Politico notes that MoveOn has already started on the kind of get-along agenda that Trippi describes by declining to join with other progressive groups in criticizing the transition team's selection of Warren to  deliver Obama's inaugural invocation.

Source: After Bush, will MoveOn live up to its name? | Politico.com 
On Transition Website, Obama Promises More to Gay Community | FiveThirtyEight.com
What Does MoveOn’s Army Want? | Bearing Drift
MoveOn's Top Priorities for 2009 | MoveOn.org