Kendrick Meek delivered a stump speech and answered questions in Delray Beach, FL, Friday to a standing-room-only crowd. He’s the only legitimate Democratic candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez, so he has my support. His heart is in the right place, but his rhetoric isn’t. He’ll have to improve that dramatically to have a shot at winning the general election.

He should ace the primary;  two of  his opponents are wildly underfunded and the third is self-funded candidate Jeff Greene, a billionaire who cleaned up betting against the housing market through credit default swaps. If that’s not enough, he’s a former Republican who ran for a San Fernando Valley, California congressional seat in the 1980s.

Kendrick Meek in Delray

Meek’s chances were never good; though Florida went for Obama in 2008, it was an uphill battle helped by a tanking economy that beat this red state blue. But things got a whole lot better when Republican hopeful and current Governor Charlie Crist turned independent, unable to out-teaparty his Republican challenger Marco Rubio. So its a three-way race.

Kendrick had good logic for his campaign plans. He’ll tar Crist with all the nutjob stuff he said when trying to out-conservative Rubio and then finish him off by calling him out as a affiliation-changing opportunist. His lack of name-recognition will be solved by non-stop campaigning and some aggressive advertising. With all the self-funded candidates, the tea-party independents, and the three way race, it should be a good year for Florida TV stations.

But Meek is not fast on his feet on the stump, especially in the Q and A. Obama raised the bar. The first three sentences after a question should be a direct answer, and that’s what Meek should be emulating. Asked a question about Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Meek meandered and never directly answered the question, when he easily could have. His mother (who represented his district before he did) voted against DOMA. He could have said, “We tried to stop this before it started, and the next best thing to do is repeal it.”

Instead, Meek emulated Joe Biden. He just talked, until his words led him into the canned “I’m a supporter of gay people” predigested spiel. That isn’t going to fly against a seasoned campaigner like newly-independent Crist, who helped Meek greatly when he went independent, but helped himself far more.

The public relations debacle that started with the Human Rights Campaign’s Comedy Rally for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell starring Kathy Griffin and ended with highly-paid HRC Director Joe Solmonese being named one of Washington’s best dressed may have claimed its first victim: Brad Luna.

At close of business, Friday, HRC’s Director of Communications left for good. “The position was eliminated,” says John Green, HRC’s director of human resources, who is unclear who will be performing Luna’s duties. “We will determine what positions will come out of that.”

For the last week, Luna had been ducking questions about what Lt. Choi was told about the nature of the rally, and HRC’s plans regarding Choi, while buzzing up a flurry of sudden activity criticizing Choi’s action and trying to raise funds to fight Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Today, HRC’s deputy communications director acting in Luna’s place has taken the direct approach. HRC simply will not answer questions about it. They will neither confirm nor deny that GetEqual‘s Robin McGehee was told Choi couldn’t speak because he hadn’t signed a release that would give Griffin’s production company intellectual property rights to his speech. They’ll say nothing further about any support they’ll offer Choi, pointing to a statement on their blog which attendees at the rally report is “utterly untrue.”

Its been 41 years since the civil disobedience of the Stonewall Riot started the modern gay movement. HRC came along 11 years later. In their 30 years, they’ve been able to redefine Stonewall to be nothing more than a verb.

Filling the 60 minutes of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List is no easy task. For each episode, you need a story, access to interesting people, and a few staged events where you can acquire tasty video able to overcome the short attention span of viewers who move along a 200-channel universe with a touch of the remote.

This week, the Griffin show is acquiring raw video for an episode featuring Griffin as “lobbyist for a day.” She’s lobbying to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). But if there ever was an example of “I just play one on TV,” it’s Kathy Griffin as lobbyist.

Enter Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the DC LGBT organization that claims to be “a grassroots force of over 750,000 members and supporters nationwide.” As hearings take place in the Senate, HRC planned a rally at Freedom Plaza. As they describe it on their “HRC Back Story” webpage: “This week, Kathy Griffin is traveling to Washington to add her voice, by lobbying Members of Congress, meeting with veterans and mobilizing support.”

But there’s a backstory to the backstory, and that’s where the backchannel gets involved. The “rally” was little more than a staged event to provide tasty video for Michael Levitt Productions to sell to Bravo. Ordinarily, that little tidbit would do little more than sicken the attending activists sharp enough to see they were again being used. But Lt. Dan Choi, for reasons only he knows (but I suspect have to do with him being among the sharp ones), took some direct action.

Dan Choi and Kathy Griffin at HRC/Bravo Rally

He asked to speak. What he was told depends upon whom you believe. The HRC claims their president Joe Solmonese told Choi that it “wasn’t his sole decision to make on the spot.” Reports from the scene on the backchannel say Choi was told, “This is Bravo’s Show.” Choi cannot tell us, because he’s in jail tonight, and reports indicate he is not being allowed a phone call.

Griffin ultimately decided to ask Choi to the podium to speak, but I doubt she, her co-producers, or HRC are very happy with what he said. He told the truth about Barney Frank’s inside information that DADT wouldn’t be repealed this year. He pointed out that the White House was where the protest should be, and he asked people to march there with him. Griffin said she would.

Lt. Choi and Capt James Pietrangelo marched to the White House and handcuffed themselves to the fence with the help of Robin McGehee of GetEqual.org. About a hundred true activists went with them, but Solmonese of HRC wasn’t among them. The HRC’s excuse? He stayed behind because he “felt it was important to stay and engage those at the rally in ways they can continue building the pressure needed for repeal.”

Immediate repeal would help neither HRC nor Griffin. Though they’d both take credit for it, HRC would lose a reason to fundraise and provide free extras for video shoots that self-promote, and Griffin would have a stale show. Make no mistake, for Griffin, its about the show. Though she said she’d march with Choi, she stayed at the video shoot, tweeting a fawning misdirection when the backchannel called her on it. After all, Kathy Griffin isn’t really an activist. She just plays one on TV.