Some may think Barack Obama’s hand was forced.
Some may think it was a cynical ploy to garner Gay Money campaign contributions or to pander to the youth vote.
Some may simply shoot themselves and the right wing in the foot, talking about distractions that their own party has raised in the middle of a recovery.
Obama himself has said his feelings have evolved, as he’s witnessed gay couples in the netherworld of “civil unions.” Marriage-lite, if you will.
And some have treated it like a Romney-sized flip flop.
One thing is for sure: it was a monumental statement to make for any President, but doubly so ahead of a re-election campaign against a party that’s pledged its not-inconsiderable resources to limit the president to one term. He very neatly swung away from leading from behind to breaking new ground.
To be sure, this energizes the base of both parties, and how can that be a bad thing if it forces us to confront issues that many on both sides wish would simply lie dormant? Obama needs that base this year as much if not moreso than he did four years ago. He carries a lot of weight in being the incumbent but the past forty years have taught us that a President who doesn’t inspire his party’s base will lose re-election.
In framing his announcement in this light, we begin to see some other, more clever and subtle things he’s done in his first term. The big knock liberals have against Obama is that he’s too centrist and that he’s turned a deaf ear to the concerns that he addressed in his first campaign.
I’ve long maintained– from back in the days when the troika of Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were in the hunt– that Obama’s liberalism was a bit of a sham. Oddly, I soften that stance somewhat in the face of the evidence. I still believe he’s a centrist politician (you can’t be a national candidate without being centrist) but I think he’s actually governed to the left of what I believed he could have. The Lily Ledbetter Act, repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and healthcare reform are all staunchly liberal positions to stake out.
They are also supremely fair ideals to have: Equal pay, equal rights, equal access to quality affordable healthcare.
This is not to say that Obama hasn’t staked out some fairly conservative positions, as well. For instance, he opened some offshore drilling sites in 2010 that previously didn’t exist, threatening wetlands on both coasts as well as the Gulf of Mexico. TARP was a near-disaster of epic proportions that didn’t address the underlying problems, that progressives pointed out: people, not banks, were hurting. It rewarded the one percent for nearly driving us off the cliff, while leaving the 99% to suffer in agony and torment of mounting bills and disappearing jobs. He caved on the Bush tax cuts, all to get a debt ceiling increase. And so on.
On balance, and a night’s reflection, I tend to believe this is an instance where President Obama weighed his options carefully, realized things balanced out, and decided to go with his heart. It is about fairness, something we’ve seen is an important factor in his administration.
It’s up to us to get his back on this. If we want him to be more progressive in his second term, something I have no doubt he wants, its up to us to reward him not only with that second term but with a Congress ready, willing and able to work with him to deliver it.
He’s shaken the nation to its foundation. Time to wake up.
In 2008 I was willing to give some benefit of doubt. Now I consider him capable of right-wing populism. RWP is not defined by the positions you take on issues like civil rights but rather on your ability to appeal to and deliver a broad populous to further the interests of narrow concentrations of power.
Obama has the ability to put a lot of people behind the interests of the corporate rich. And many of those people will call themselves progressives.
I sure hope I am wrong.
Republican politicians fear that if same-sex marriage is legal their boyfriends will give them ultimatums.
Andy Borowitz †@BorowitzReport
Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. ~ Phil Jackson
The guy who was for it in 1996, then disavowed that he was for it and even went so far as to say that the survey he completed and signed wasn’t completed (and signed) by him. It couldn’t be, because he’s not for gay marriage.
And now he’s for it again, just not in any meaningful way because it’s up to the states to decide. Which means that he supports the vote in N. Carolina as much as the idea of gay marriage. Or some form of 11th dimensional chess …
He’s a politician. An American politician of the late 20th/early 21st Century. He’ll say whatever he needs to say to get elected and it has no bearing on what he’ll do as President.
“OTP – Occupy The Patriarchy” ~ me
Obsidian Wings, by Doctor Science, May 10
Liberal Japonicus got there first, but I’ll just add something about what I think are the political calculations involved in Obama’s “coming out” in favor of marriage equality. In particular, I suspect it’s a tactic designed to appeal to a subset of big donors, especially in the financial industry.
In the first place, no way were Biden’s remarks a “gaffe”, that was a trial balloon — which is part of Biden’s job, of course. I’m betting Obama’s announcement and its timing have been planned for weeks if not months.
If Obama had publicly declared for marriage equality any time before the North Carolina vote, then the headlines yesterday would have been, “NC Voters Reject Obama’s Stance”. The fact that he made his declaration the very first day after the vote says to me that it was the vote, and the fact that everyone was pretty sure Amendment One was going to pass, that was holding him back.
Now, I’m sure his thinking has indeed “evolved” — and that the First Lady has been making damn sure it *did* evolve — but there is no way this is just a “personal” opinion.
Obama, Gay Marriage, and the American Equality Quilt
Esquire Politics Blog, By Charles P. Pierce, May 10
Little Falls-Herkimer Service Area, New York State Thruway — Odd to get the news via television on the radio. MSNBC was on the satellite as we came down out of the Finger Lakes and Chris Matthews was howling about The wolves! The wolves! The wolf dens were going to open and the wolves were going to be on the loose. Martin Bashir seemed to be trying to pry Matthews off the ceiling of the studio. The president apparently had told Robin Roberts of ABC that he had come to support marriage equality and, while Matthews reckoned it to be a great day for human rights, which it unquestionably is, he also cautioned, in a rather unfortunate double-entendre, that “Karl Rove is going to be gnawing on this bone right up until the election.”
The administration really did manage this well. I do not believe for a moment, as the combined propaganda apparatus of both the White House and NBC News are going to sell it, that David Gregory, out of the clear blue sky, asked Joe Biden about gay marriage on Meet The Press last Sunday without knowing he was going to get a whopper of an answer. (Sometimes, it can be very useful to have a vice president with a reputation as a motormouth.) I also don’t believe that the Morning Zoo crew on MSNBC just happened to wonder what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thought about the whole deal a couple of days later. I don’t think it was any coincidence that the North Carolina vote on an egregiously gratuitous ban on not only gay marriage, but also of civil unions, happened the day before the president hustled to sit down with ABC this afternoon. I think somebody on Pennsylvania Avenue — or, perhaps, from the campaign HQ in Chicago — whispered a little somethin’-somethin’ to someone at 30 Rock, knowing what was going to happen in North Carolina, to get the ball rolling. I am not riding down the thruway in a turnip truck.
As to the argument that the president “didn’t want this” to open up in an election year, I think he did. It’s too perfect an ending to the narrative of his “evolving position” that he’s been talking about for three years. He saw a clear injustice — the North Carolina vote — and he decided that his conscience would brook no more delay. Look at how carefully he wove his support of marriage equality into the fabric of everything else he’d done for the cause of equality since he’s been president. He talked about how our men and women in the armed forces (you know, the gay ones who can serve openly because he ended Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, and who can get married in Massachusetts and Hawaii because he told his Justice Department not to pursue cases under the Defense of Marriage Act) shouldn’t be denied a right that we all have — to marry — just because they’ve left the killing fields. I think he made a precise political calculation, that being ahead on this issue will be more beneficial to him going forward than the prolonged exercise in subtlety that had begun to look like dithering. I think both the Biden and Duncan interviews were long-range reconnaissance, and I think he got the information he wanted. I have my differences with this president, god knows, but this is one thing of which I am certain: He does absolutely nothing by accident. He has spent his entire life learning how to take cautious, considered steps. He’s damned good at it by now.
I’ll say it again: Barrack Obama is America’s Tony Blair – in exactly the sense that he’s studied and then emulated how Blair was able to be all things to all people for eight years.
The most telling statistic was those young people who believed the church was too involved in politics.
That’s a very positive turn of events, no matter how you slice it. It means that future church officers will be slower to voice a political opinion, or that more people will contemplate leaving a radical congregation and either opt out of religion altogether, or find more moderate flocks.