Weigel

Obama Evolves

ABC News gets the exclusive, concluding a four-day news cycle during which the president’s obvious ruse about gay marriage became untenable.

For me personally it’s important to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

You could look at this and think that the campaign’s roll-out – it started on Saturday! – was undone by Joe Biden’s loose talk. An alternate theory: The old, phony Obama position, useful as long as gay marriage was unpopular, had stopped being useful. Every interest group that took the anti side was lined up against Obama anyway, for sound reasons – court appointments, the defense of DOMA. Polling on gay marriage had moved, narrowly, into the positive zone. The negatives of a flip-flop* were vanishing. And so the ruse came to an end.

*It’s a flip-flop because Obama, running for a deep blue state Senate seat in 1996, was openly for gay marriage. He flipped in the U.S. Senate/presidential portion of his career.