A day after Obama’s U-turn on gay marriage, I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. Morally and legally, he did the right thing. Marriage is a legal contract. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law for all American citizens regardless of race, wealth, or sexual orientation. It will be on these grounds, I would imagine, that the Supreme Court will eventually overturn state bans on gay marriage. (Many right-wing libertarians would support such a move.)
It should be noted, however, that Obama was careful not to call for any federal action on this issue. Immediately after ABC News broadcast his interview with Robin Roberts, his aides were busy reminding reporters that he still believes this is something for the states to decide. Clearly mindful of the political impact, especially in swing states such as Nevada and North Carolina, the President himself said that he was speaking purely as an individual. After observing some of his staff members in committed, monogamous gay relationships, talking it over with his wife and children, and thinking things through in terms of his Christian faith, he decided to go with his conscience. As he told Roberts: “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.”
If you believe this “Saul on the road to Damascus story,” then you are a less skeptical person than I am. Obama is a principled man, but he is also a calculating and opportunistic politician, as evidenced, most recently, by his eagerness to exploit the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing. In 2008, when he said marriage should be restricted to a man and woman, the moral arguments were just as clear as they are now. Obama, like Bill Clinton and other Democrats before him, took what was perceived to be the politically safe route, softening the blow to gay-rights activists by promising to eliminate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military, and then delivering on that promise.
Obama’s stance in 2008 was a product of careful cost-benefit analysis, and so, I would wager, was his reversal yesterday. This was primarily about internal Democratic politics. Confronted with an enthusiasm deficit (think about those empty seats in Ohio) and a dollar deficit (think about Karl Rove and his super-duper Super PAC), Obama needed to fire up his base, gin up some more campaign contributions, and head off a damaging row. (Supporters of same-sex marriage were threatening to stage a floor fight at the Democratic Convention.) In saying the words “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he accomplished all of these things at some political cost nationally, but one that he and his advisers evidently decided was bearable.
Some of the benefits are already evident. With big donations from Wall Street down sharply from 2008, the Democrats are even more reliant on supporters in the media and entertainment industries, but even there his bundlers had been encountering some resistance and disappointment with his record. Yesterday’s announcement ensures that Obama, when he arrives in Los Angeles today for a fundraiser at George Clooney’s house, will receive a hero’s welcome. Ditto next month, when he is due back in Hollywood to attend the annual gala of the L.G.B.T. Leadership Council.
The Democratic Party, like all progressive parties around the world, is a coalition of activist interest groups and more lackadaisical supporters who align around some core values. What this episode demonstrates is that gay-rights activists are now a very powerful interest group in the Democratic Party, and support for same-sex marriage is one of the party’s core values. If any Democratic candidate, even a sitting President, wants the party to rally around him, he has to accede to this reality. As Richard Socarides pointed out yesterday, “While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama … no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire.”
But the Democratic Party is not the country at large. While public attitudes are undoubtedly changing, coming out in favor of gay marriage is still a risky proposition for a national politician. A much-discussed Gallup poll earlier this week found that fifty per cent of Americans favor legalizing gay marriage and forty-eight per cent oppose it. As has been widely pointed out, most of the opponents were self-identified Republicans who won’t vote for Obama anyway. Among self-identified independents, fifty-seven per cent said they supported gay marriage and just forty per cent said they opposed it.
If these figures are taken at face value, it might seem that supporting gay marriage is a vote winner. But where exactly? In New York, perhaps. (Nearly a year after leading the way on this issue, Governor Cuomo is still doing very well in the polls.) And in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and a few other places. But these states aren’t where the election will be decided. In the battlegrounds—especially those in the Midwest—opposition to gay marriage is much more prevalent. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, just forty per cent of Midwesterners support the idea.
It is possible, of course, that Obama’s campaign team has already discounted many of the Rust Belt areas, heavily inhabited, as they are, by white ethnics who never warmed to an African-American President to begin with. Team Obama’s grand project is to build a new coalition of young people, well-educated professionals, moderates, and minorities—a coalition capable of winning rapidly-changing states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia. If voters in these places harbored more liberal views on gay marriage than their counterparts in the Midwest, then conceivably Obama’s U-turn could help him redraw the electoral map.
If, if, if…. In some of these places, according to the Pew study, opposition to same-sex marriage is even stronger than it is in the Midwest. Taking the South as a whole, just one in three people support legalization, the Pew researchers found. In Tuesday’s vote in North Carolina, a state where same-sex marriages are already illegal, a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to a man and a woman and to ban same-sex civil unions, passed by more than twenty percentage points. Twenty-eight other states have already passed similar amendments, and they include all those on the Obama campaign’s target list: Arizona (2008), Florida (2008), Nevada (2002), and Virginia (2006). Far from helping Obama in those states, his new stance is likely to cost him some votes in them, perhaps even a percentage point or two, come November.
Why then did he change course? To repeat, I suspect it came down to cost-benefit analysis. Because of the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party, the costs of sticking with his previous position of supporting civil unions but opposing gay marriage had become too high. Faced with the threat of an embarrassing battle at the Convention in Charlotte, a story in today’s Times makes clear, the President and his advisors had already acknowledged that he would have to change course sometime before September. The only question was when. Turning necessity into an opportunity, they decided to try and get ahead of the game.
In rallying his supporters behind him and garnering positive coverage in the media, Obama’s gambit has already proved a big success. (Today's story in the Washington Post about the young Mitt Romney allegedly bullying a gay high school classmate is an additional bonus.) But it’s very early. Make no mistake, he has handed a wedge issue to an opposing party that has a long history of successfully exploiting them. Until we see the voting returns in places like North Carolina and Florida, we won’t know how this bigger gamble has turned out.
Photograph by Sara D. Davis/Getty Images.
