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Biden blamed; politics drove timing - POLITICO.com Print View

Joe Biden just might go down in history as the guy who forced Barack Obama to publicly announce his private support for gay marriage.

But the vice president is no hero in the West Wing, and administration officials are struggling to cast Obama’s truly historic — and risky — announcement as something more than an election-year shotgun wedding.

Obama’s interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts capped a frenetic half-week of backstage political maneuvering after Biden said he was “comfortable” with gay marriage during a TV interview that was taped Friday and aired Sunday. It followed the passage Tuesday of an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in North Carolina that illustrated the divisions in typically cohesive Obama constituencies, including women, Hispanics and blacks. And it exposed a few divisions in the Obama-Biden camp.

Senior administration officials admit that Biden’s comment was, indeed, the catalyst for Obama to make his historic announcement weeks earlier than planned.

But Biden’s remarks on “Meet the Press” deeply annoyed Obama’s team, people close to the situation tell POLITICO, because it aggrandized his role at the expense of Obama’s yeoman efforts on behalf of the community and pushed up the timing of a sensitive announcement they had hoped to break — at a time and place of their own choosing — in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this fall.

(Also on POLITICO: W.H.: Joe Biden forced President Obama’s hand on gay marriage)

Nor did it tickle anyone, from Obama on down, that Biden — who backed the Defense of Marriage Act while serving in the Senate in the 1990s — seemed to be getting more credit in the LGBT community than a president who has actually taken steps to repeal the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as something that could only take place between a man and a woman.

And it chafed Obama’s team that Biden had, at times, privately argued for the president to hold off on his support of marriage equality to avoid a backlash among Catholic voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to two officials familiar with those discussions.

An email to a Biden spokesperson wasn’t returned. But another administration official sympathetic to the vice president told POLITICO that Biden has been consistent in his support for marriage equality and reports to the contrary were inaccurate.

In the end, people close to the president say, Obama’s decision to go public with his support for marriage equality wasn’t a tough call after Biden’s remarks. The core of their argument against Mitt Romney is that he has no real convictions. Any news story portraying Obama as a political schemer is poison — especially if it appears in newspapers Obama respects, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, according to senior Democrats.

“I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said in a White House interview with Roberts.

“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Obama said. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs. … The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule — you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

Advisers in Obama’s orbit say they have no idea how the debate will play out in the general election, although they don’t anticipate it being a major factor. They also said most voters already assume Obama supports gay and lesbian nuptials, blunting the impact of the decision. And recent polls suggest that the decision won’t alienate many independents and may actually galvanize younger voters.

“It was harder when he would talk about evolving. That always sounded off,” said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, which urged Obama to support marriage equality. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, come on.’ That felt like a false political note.”

Cathcart said the timing of the announcement surprised him, although he added that he thought “they can’t drag this out until after the election. It is just too far away. The cacophony of voices is too much.”

Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress, said the announcement would help Obama reclaim his 2008 mantle as an agent of change. “Some of the president’s greatest moments in 2007 and 2008 and during his time in public office has been when he seems to call the country to be bigger than its pettiness,” she said.

“The stance the president took today helped reinvigorate the idea that President Obama is a different kind of politician. … What says ‘forward’ more than what he did today?” she asked, referring to Obama’s 2012 slogan.

The White House hopes the historic nature of Obama’s decision will eventually overshadow the sloppiness of the process that led to it.

Senior White House officials, speaking to a small group of reporters at a Wednesday background briefing, denied reports that two of Obama’s top political advisers, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, urged Obama to slow-walk the decision for fear of a backlash.

They say the internal debate ended about three months ago, when the president told them he supported gay marriage after weighing the personal, religious and political considerations.

But there were clearly some in Obama’s inner circle who were more enthusiastic about the decision than others, according to advocates and top Democrats.

Two of the most consistent advocates for marriage equality were two of the most important women in Obama’s life: his wife, Michelle, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who has repeatedly told her friends in the LGBT community that Obama was moving in their direction, according to people familiar with those interactions.

It’s hard to find a person in Obama’s orbit who didn’t have a relationship with gay-rights advocates or the highly influential community of gay and lesbian donors who have supported the president. Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter, for instance, is a former consultant to the Human Rights Campaign, one of the country’s most powerful LGBT advocacy organizations.

But supporting gay marriage — versus backing it publicly in the middle of unpredictable election — are two separate things, and some in the LGBT community urged Obama and his team to defer support until after he was safely ensconced in a second term.

Pollsters have yet to test the key question in swing states: Does Barack Obama’s position on gay marriage make you more or less likely to support him?

But there is growing support when Americans are asked the generic question of whether they support gay marriage or civil unions.

A new Gallup Poll shows that same-sex marriage is supported by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by 48 percent. Sixty-five percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents support legalizing gay marriage, but only 22 percent of Republicans support it. African-American voters are less supportive of legalizing gay marriage than the average American and “much less” than the average Democrat, Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup poll, said in an interview.

“It is a low-priority issue in the abstract,” Newport said.

“In terms of the implications when the economy is such a huge issue, we just don’t know,” he added.

Berwood Yost, a pollster at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., said his polling shows two-thirds of Pennsylvanians support civil unions and a majority back gay marriage.

“I don’t think it hurts him in this state,” he said. “There are certainly ramifications, but I think it is a net help. It probably doesn’t hurt.”

Administration officials, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity and no direct quotations, said Obama’s decision was personal, and only the timing was a matter of politics. Yet they refused to supply any details of the president’s deliberations on the issue — or how he had overcome what he had earlier described as a deeply personal struggle with profound religious implications.

Instead, they described a political problem that needed to be fixed — fast. After Biden’s comments, Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed gay marriage Monday. And then there was another trigger: a Monday afternoon briefing by press secretary Jay Carney, which was dominated by questions from aggrieved reporters who all but accused Obama of cowardice on the issue.

Obama made his announcement to save Carney, one official joked.

But the damage control was anything but a joke. The White House reached out to Roberts because, they say, they had previously granted rival network NBC broad access to Obama during their coverage of the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Until today, Biden was the highest-ranking administration official to signal support for same-sex marriage. During his interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, the vice president declared: “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.”

Obama advisers responded with a screen of covering fire — in the form of Tweets and emails — that have not aged well since the weekend.

Axelrod quickly posted on his Twitter account that Biden wasn’t breaking any new ground.

“What VP said — that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights — is precisely POTUS’s position,” Axelrod wrote on Sunday.

And the vice president’s office released a statement saying Biden had not endorsed same-hyphensex marriage and that he, too, was “evolving.”

By Wednesday, other officials were portraying the situation very differently: The president accepted the risk of a courageous moral decision, with a little nudge from his sometimes annoying sidekick.

“When the country is wrestling with important moral and human-hyphenrights questions, all of us as Americans and especially presidents as leaders eventually have to decide which side of history we want to be on,” said Evan Wolfson, president of Freedom to Marry, which launched in 2003 to campaign for gay marriage legalization nationwide.

“Some Americans, many Americans, who may not yet agree with his position will respect his authenticity and clarity.”


Eric D. Schwerin
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