Remember when Barack Obama bravely came out in favor of same-sex
marriage before North Carolina voted on the issue? After all, Obama
carried the state in 2008. The Democratic National Convention will
be held there this summer. His strongest voting bloc, black
Americans, was projected to vote for the pro-traditional marriage
Amendment One by a
2-1 margin.
There’s good reason not to remember: there was no such profile
in courage moment. North Carolina passed Amendment One with 61
percent of the vote, with the president tut-tutting about his
disappointment, while aides tried furiously to walk back Vice
President Joe Biden’s expressions of comfort with redefining
marriage. Only the next day did Obama carefully and cautiously
proclaim that he had found the missing link in his marriage
evolution.
Indeed, the president’s position was as subjective as possible:
“At a certain point, 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.” As George Will has
quipped, “If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the
first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent.”
Although he has opposed defense-of-marriage ballot initiatives
throughout his presidency, even while nominally against same-sex
marriage, Obama left the door open to them last week. He said that
the definition of marriage should be left up to the states. Where
Mario Cuomo once took a stand on abortion frequently described as
“personally opposed, but,” Obama has pioneered the gay marriage
stance “personally support, but.”
“Given the impotence of his endorsement, it really comes down to
one man sharing his personal opinion about a moral matter with the
rest of nation,”
writes author and commentator Timothy Stanley. “And then making
a lot of money out of it.”
Follow the money. The Washington Post has reported that
one in six of Obama’s top campaign bundlers — the people who raise
money hand over fist from the “1 percent” for the president’s
reelection — is gay. The Hollywood Reporter
noted that Obama’s diffidence on marriage left many rich
celebrities and West Coast donors reluctant to open their
wallets.
Hollywood has long led on the issue of gay marriage, putting the
president at odds with them on the matter. During THR and
Google’s Pre-White House Correspondents’ Dinner Party, nearly every
celebrity surveyed listed the legalization of gay marriage on a
national level
among the issues about which they care most, if not number one.
In a
recent op-ed for THR, Dustin Lance Black came down
hard on both Democrats and Republicans for their refusal to move
forward on the issue.
Needless to say, that doesn’t track with the priorities of most
ordinary voters on either side of the issue. But ordinary voters do
not attend $40,000 per person Obama fundraising dinners at George
Clooney’s house. Obama flew to join Clooney the day after he
unburdened himself on gay marriage. The event was expected to bring
in $15 million.
Within hours of Obama’s announcement, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) unveiled a new fundraiser
asking donors to “stand with the president on marriage equality.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi signed a DCCC fundraising email
announcing, “Breaking: President Obama supports marriage
equality.”
According to one
report, Obama raised $1 million within 90 minutes of announcing
his support for gay marriage. An Obama bundler told
BuzzFeed, “There are more LGBT co-chairs across the
country are raising more money than we’ve ever raised. And you’ll
see a lot more of that now.”
What we are also likely to see is an election that resembles
2004. George W. Bush was a wobbly, not-terribly popular incumbent;
John Kerry was the not-especially beloved challenger from
Massachusetts. The two campaigns worked very hard to win the
presidency by maximizing their base voters.
By coming out for gay marriage, Obama has boosted the enthusiasm
of core supporters — young people, liberals, gays and lesbians —
in addition to his fundraising totals. (He may have some minor
concerns with black churches getting out the vote at the
margins.)
But he has created an equal and opposite reaction, helping Mitt
Romney look more appealing to evangelical voters who haven’t been
enthusiastic about the likely Republican nominee. And the HHS
contraception mandate controversy may make it harder for
evangelicals to believe that the government will allow them to
stick to the traditional definition of marriage in their
churches.
In 2004, Obama chided the pundits who “like to slice and dice
our country into red states and blue.” But that mishmash of red and
blue, divided along social, cultural, and religious lines, may be
more representative national colors come November than the
rainbow.
