Last week, everything changed. President Obama “evolved” into a supporter of same-sex marriage. So now let’s hear what Andrew Sullivan has to say on this topic. The day Obama announced his reversal evolution, Sullivan wrote that he was “uncharacteristically at a loss for words”; that “ it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House”; “that’s why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in”; and that “there are tears in my eyes.” He then spent the next week on his blog hailing Obama’s courage, integrity and greatness as reflected by this decision of historic significance (the same decision that he spent three years insisting was irrelevant before Obama made it). He then penned this week’s Newsweek cover story in which he wrote that “when I watched the interview, the tears came flooding down” and “to have the president of the United States affirm my humanity—and the humanity of all gay Americans—was, unexpectedly, a watershed.” Yesterday, he went on The Chris Matthews Show, and this actually happened:

That’s from the same person who, to defend anti-gay-marriage Obama, has been writing things like: “this desperate desire among some gays for some kind of affirmation from one man is a little sad.“ I’ve long defended Sullivan as much as anyone; I consider him a friend; and I understand that as one of the first marriage equality advocates, he might be more emotional than most about this admittedly emotional issue. Still, this has to be one of the creepiest episodes in American punditry in some time, and that’s true for two independent reasons:

First, it shows the dedication some media figures and Obama followers have to glorifying and justifying whatever the President does, even when the acts being defended are the exact opposite of one another. Sullivan spent three years aggressively scorning everyone who criticized Obama’s marriage position on the ground that it’s irrelevant and inconsequential what the President thinks about marriage equality, even arguing that it’s “sad” to watch gays seek presidential approval; then, the minute Obama announces that he supports same-sex marriage, Sullivan takes the lead role in depicting this act as the Peak of Human Courage and Integrity, one of monumental significance, while he all but crusades for Obama’s instantaneous Sainthood. Given how effusive Sullivan now is about the incalculable importance of Obama’s support for same-sex marriage — for gay youth, for equality generally, for all that is Good and Noble in Our Politics — doesn’t he at least owe an apology to all those gay activists who endured Sullivan’s condescending scorn when they were trying to pressure Obama to “evolve”?

But the more important point is that it’s dangerous, literally, to be willing to twist one’s own views this way to glorify whatever the leader does at any given moment. Sullivan has been willing to criticize Obama more than most of the President’s most devoted followers, but this complete turnaround in the flash of a presidential gesture is hard to watch.

Second, and much more important, it is wrong on every last level to relate to the President as a “father figure.” There was a time when I thought Sullivan’s serial blinding reverence for political leaders — Reagan and Thatcher, then Bush 43, now Obama — was the by-product of some sort of transferred British need to be subjects of a monarch. But I don’t think that theory explains much, since all kinds of native-born Americans do the same (remember all this and this?). I was supportive of Obama’s marriage announcement because of the political benefits it would engender, not because it gave me some kind of personal validation that my father has finally accepted who I am. The President is not Our Father; he’s a politician who, like all people wielding political power, is in great need of constant critical scrutiny and adversarial checks — from all citizens, but especially media figures. Relating to him as some kind of guiding paternalistic authority is, I’m sorry to say, really quite warped. But it’s far from uncommon, and that explains a lot.

UPDATE: Bob Somerby appears in comments and writes: “This is the homeland; the president is the father. Why is this hard to follow?” Language, of course, reveals much about how and what we think, which is part of why I find this so disturbing.

UPDATE II: I don’t have the slightest problem with Andrew Sullivan or anyone else being emotional about Obama’s expression of support for same-sex marriage, and this post has absolutely nothing to do with that issue, so if you’re one of those people who think that I’m objecting in any way to his display of emotion and intend to reply to that, please re-read what’s written here, with an emphasis on the first three paragraphs, to see that what’s being discussed here has no remote relationship to that issue.

UPDATE III [Tues.]: Sullivan referenced and implicitly criticized this critique (while uncharacteristically refusing to link to it); my reply to him, sent by email, is here.

UPDATE IV [Tues.]: Sullivan now has a more detailed and direct response, though my email reply applies equally to it.

Regarding the Obama administration’s constant killing of Muslims in numerous countries, Chomsky said that “it’s almost as if they’re consciously trying to increase the threat” (last week, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief warned that Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen risk converting Yemeni domestic militants into “dedicated enemies of the west“). What’s most remarkable, Chomsky said, is how little debate is stirred by these constant acts of lawless violence compared to the controversy created by the less lethal Bush policies (though see the prior paragraph for why that is: “President Obama has progressivism in his heart and that makes all the difference in the world”).

In related news, the administration of President Obama — whom Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly credited with “presiding over” the Arab Spring — announced on Friday that the U.S. would resume arms sales to the regime in Bahrain, a move that “has incensed opposition activists in the tiny Gulf kingdom who see the deal as a signal that the US supports Bahrain’s repression of opposition protests.” Moreover, “the resumption comes despite Bahrain doing little to sufficiently address” systematic human rights abuses against democratic protesters. But as Sullivan put it in his latest in a long line of Newsweek love letters to the Commander-in-Chief, Obama succeeded last week “the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game.” Given that, I’m sure there is some good explanation for how these arms sales to the regime in Bahrain proves he’s more supportive than ever of the Arab Spring and democracy, just as his failed effort to keep troops in Iraq meant He Ended The Iraq War, his unprecedented war on whistleblowers demonstrates his commitment to open government, increased anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world shows he nobly restored America’s standing in the world, and his relentless civilian-killing drone assaults prove the merit of his Nobel Peace Prize. It’s all about the long game.

As I did this segment, I actually thought about how complete is the media suppression of the question of what causes Yemenis to want to attack the U.S. Extensive establishment media coverage has been devoted over the last few weeks to Yemen, and almost nobody in those discussions ever raises the question of why some people in Yemen might support such attacks. If you think about it, it’s really quite an impressive propaganda feat. It’s just natural for people who are targeted with violence to wonder what is motivating the attackers — recall the “Why-Do-They-Hate-Us?” bafflement in the wake of 9/11 — and yet that question has been almost entirely disappeared from establishment media discourse:

(2) For those of you who weren’t sufficiently angry at me for my praise of Obama’s support for same-sex marriage, I now have an Op-Ed in The Guardian elaborating on one discrete point: why this is an event of historical significance. I was actually motivated to write it by this excellent comment in response to my post on Wednesday; the commenter explained that what mattered here isn’t how this does or does not reflect on Obama but rather the impact of the act itself:

I’m generally no fan of Obama, and many of the reasons why are reported regularly in Glenn’s blog. . . .

On this issue, Obama’s statement today will be remembered 20 years from now, while his motives, and the North Carolina vote yesterday, and Biden’s carefully calibrated statement last week, and Obama’s previous dithering on this issue, will be long forgotten. A sitting President of the United States is willing, for the first time, to personally back basic civil rights for people who love others of the same sex. That is an action. It’s mostly symbolic, sure, but it will mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people.

I’m old enough to remember eight years of Ronald Reagan not once mentioning the AIDS pandemic while it raged. Any queer or queer ally who lived through that era will instantly recognize today’s significance. That was less than 25 years ago. To get from there to this is remarkable.

No, today’s statement doesn’t get any legislation passed (at least, not directly), and the states’ rights hedge is a copout. But the important takeaway is that marriage equality opponents, and homophobes in general, can no longer dismiss gay civil rights as a fringe concern, and the notion that we can be separated from the fabric of American life and be shunned, buried, and forgotten is officially dead.

Eventually, marriage equality and all those other civil and social rights straight people take for granted will become the law of the land and the norm for everyone. Today helps get us there. That’s worth celebrating no matter how many odious other things Obama’s done.

As he suggests, people who have lived through and were personally affected by that history probably have an instinctive understanding of the significance of this week’s events, so I wanted to place this issue in an historical context and used the Guardian Op-Ed to do that.

(3) In The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Robert Worth has a long and superbly reported article on the rampant torture, lawlessness, arbitrary detentions, vengeance “justice”, and militia rule plaguing Libya — more than six months after the killing of Moammar Ghadaffi (he also notes some isolated flashes of human decency in the midst of the horrors). A couple of days ago, the NYT reported on an attack on the prime minister’s headquarters and said this:

Truckloads of armed men attacked the Tripoli headquarters of Libya’s interim prime minister on Tuesday, in a new demonstration of the lawlessness pervading the capital just weeks before a scheduled national election. . . . Security in the capital is negligible, and gunfights between armed groups from rival neighborhoods or towns are a frequent occurrence in its streets. . . .

“You know that security here is a big joke,” Fathi Baja, a council member, said at the time. With an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck, he said, “you can do whatever you want — nobody can stop you.”

Obviously, one of the lessons from the attack on Iraq was that if foreign nations use military force to remove a long-standing despot and then fail to stabilize the country, it will be followed by extreme levels of violence, lawlessness, chaos, brutality and militia rule. That is precisely what is happening in Libya, and has been happening there for almost a year now.

As I wrote from the start of the proposed intervention, one cannot say that things have improved for Libyans by the mere killing of Gadaffi without knowing what replaces his rule (those who declared victory based solely on Gadaffi’s death were guilty of succumbing to the adolescent, Hollywood-manufactured tendency to view the supreme foreign goal as killing the “bad guys”; Chris Hayes wrote about that mentality a year ago). It’s still possible, of course, that the situation in Libya can improve, but it’s been fairly infuriating to watch the loudest advocates of the intervention, who flamboyantly claimed vindication upon Gadaffi’s death, simply ignore the aftermath. For obvious reasons, that conspicuous indifference seriously calls into question the role that “humanitarianism” actually played here.

(4) Matt Taibbi has an excellent post on the 2012 presidential election, focusing on how boring and apathy-producing it is, particularly compared to the 2008 election, and how this threatens to undermine one of the prime purposes of American elections — distracting citizens’ attention from what is actually being done:

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. . . .

In other words, Obama versus McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House.

Then there’s one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don’t have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don’t have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. . . . The presidential race is always a great illusion, designed to distract people from the more hardcore politics in this country, the minutiae of trade and tax and monetary policy that’s too boring to cover. When the presidential race is a bad show, people might not have any choice but to pay attention to those other things. And this year’s version is the worst show in memory. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Digby dissents from that last point on the ground that political strategists and media mavens are adept at keeping interest levels high by manufacturing the appearance of meaningful conflicts: “It’s like one of those Housewife reality shows where everyone is obscenely wealthy and they create phony feuds and stage screaming fights and then magically become bffs the next season. It’s kind of a trainwreck that you can’t keep your eyes off of at first, but then you just end up falling asleep in front of the TV.”

I think I side more with Digby on this specific question. No matter how trivial are most of the differences between the two candidates and no matter how much each of them is a banal, status-quo-perpetuating imperial manager, the power of political manipulation is potent indeed. Recall that the Obama campaign was named Advertising Age‘s Marketer of the Year for 2008 for its excellence in brand management (the brand being Obama), and the campaign also “claimed two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards.”

To see how vulnerable people are to this advertising manipulation, one need look only a few posts down from the one by Digby which I just quoted, to one on her blog written by Democratic Party door-to-door canvasser David Atkins. He posted a super-trite one-minute video from the Obama campaign that begins by blaming Bush for America’s woes while sad villain music plays in the background. Then, when 2009 arrives, the ad suddenly shifts to happy, majestic, uplifting muzak — the kind played on an ABC after-school special when a boy and his lost dog are finally re-united – as we see images of the Democratic Commander-in-Chief boldly exiting his presidential helicopter as he stiffly salutes Marines, followed by a grainy-green video feed of U.S. military helicopters dispatched on a dangerous mission under his strong command. We are told that, under Obama, “our greatest enemy [cue bin Laden's face] was brought to justice by our greatest heroes [U.S. soldiers using night-cam helmets and automatic rifles]” and that “He believed in us, fought for us,” and that the American middle class is returning to its greatness, and that “you don’t quit, and neither does he.”

After viewing this mundane, vapid jingoistic tripe, Atkins gushed:

It’s beautiful. Brilliant. . . . It’s hopeful. Inspiring. . . . As a political observer, watching the ad gives me a rush of endorphins, not least because I know that the team that puts out ads like this is probably going to defeat Mitt Romney’s more hapless crew.

Watching that ad literally causes a chemical change to his brain: it triggers “a rush of endorphins.” It makes him feel pleasure, and powerful, and purposeful. And remember, this is someone who writes on (and thus presumably reads) the blog of a very astute political commentator, one who on a virtually daily basis documents the cynicism, deceit and deficiencies at the heart of the Obama presidency (and was also one of the earliest and most vocal skeptics of the notion that Obama the Candidate was some sort of grand, transformational figure), so just imagine how ads like this affect someone less exposed to those facts than he. Indeed, Atkins himself expressly acknowledges that the imagery injected into his brain bears little resemblance to reality, but that rational awareness is no match for the emotional and psychological manipulation. He stands helpless before it, and is grateful for that (just as those who feel thrills “running up their legs” or “starbursts” in their groins when watching their favorite political leader are grateful for those chemical sensations).

That’s what effective political oratory accomplishes: it overrides rational thought and imposes a false reality from the outside. Recall what Ezra Klein wrote in 2008 after listening to Obama, in an article appropriately entitled “Obama’s Gift”:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. His speeches are so big as to expose the smallness of the pretty prejudices and mundane considerations that might interrupt the march of his words, so big that they inspire his listeners to rise to meet their challenge. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our best selves, to the place where America exists as a ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

That’s virtually biblical in its praise. And while Klein himself, after watching Obama up close for several years, has become more measured and grounded, Obama is still a highly effective politician capable of this level of exploitation: exploiting people’s hopes and desires. When you combine that with the desire to believe — to feel once again that he will uplift people’s lives and that the hope one placed in him was justified and not misguided: nobody wants to feel like they were successfully defrauded — it’s an easy trick to repeat. There will probably be lowered levels of enthusiasm this time around. There will be some 2008 supporters who refuse to vote for him at all. But political operatives on each side will spend the next six months using every available form of brand management and advertising manipulation to continuously impart the message that Everything is At Stake — that it’s a grand Manichean battle between Our Great Leader and Their Evil Villain — and there will be plenty of endorphins pumping through people’s brains. There will be enough to drown a large country.

With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.” Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.

Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. . . .  Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” . . .

Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street–around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting–his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama’s supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.

It’s worth making two additional points about this. First, the pressure continuously applied on Obama by some gay groups, most gay activists, and (especially) rich gay funders undoubtedly played a significant role in all of these successes. As David Sirota explained today, this demonstrates why it is so vital to always apply critical pressure even to politicians one likes and supports, and conversely, it demonstrates why it is so foolish and irresponsible to devote oneself with uncritical, blind adoration to a politician, whether in an election year or any other time (unconditional allegiance is the surest way to render one’s beliefs and agenda irrelevant). When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it’s incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent.

It may very well be true that Obama took this step not out of any genuine conviction, but because he perceives that high levels of enthusiasm among the Democratic base generally and gay donors specifically are necessary for his re-election, or because Biden’s comments forced his hand, or any number of other tactical reasons. I don’t know what his secret motives are, but even if they could be discerned, I think it’s irrelevant.

When it comes to assessing a politician, what matters, at least to me, are actions, not motives. If they do the wrong thing, they should be criticized regardless of motive; conversely, if they do the right thing, they should be credited. I’ve had zero tolerance over the last three years for people who pop up to justify all the horrible things Obama has done by claiming that he is forced to do them out of political necessity or in cowardly deference to public opinion; that’s because horrible acts don’t become less horrible because they’re prompted by some rational, self-interested political motive rather than conviction. That’s equally true of positive acts: they don’t become less commendable because they were the by-product of political pressure or self-preservation; when a politician takes the right course of action, as Obama did today, credit is merited, regardless of motive.

It should go without saying that none of this mitigates the many horrendous things Obama has done in other areas, nor does it mean he deserves re-election. But just as it’s intellectually corrupted to refuse to criticize him when he deserves it, the same is true of refusing to credit him when he deserves it. Today, he deserves credit. LGBT equality is one area — and it’s an important area for millions of Americans — where he has conducted himself commendably and deserves praise. That was true before today, but even more so now.

UPDATE: Adam Serwer complains that while endorsing same-sex marriage as a personal view, Obama insisted that it is up to the states to decide; thus, writes Serwer, “Obama has endorsed marriage equality federalism—not the notion that marriage for gays and lesbians is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution that can never be taken away.” He adds, correctly, that Obama has merely “adopted the same position that Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2004, when Cheney said he believed in marriage equality but that the states should be allowed to decide by a show of hands, as North Carolina did Tuesday, whether gays and lesbians have the same rights as everyone else.” Gawker’s John Cook voices a similar complaint.

This objection is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. I actually had this debate with Adam over the weekend on Twitter, as I argued that Cheney had endorsed marriage equality back in 2004 while Adam insisted that Cheney had merely advanced a states’ rights argument. But Cheney back then — like Obama today — said that he believes same-sex couples should be able to legally marry. That’s marriage equality. It may be true that each believes that it’s an issue for the states to decide democratically — which means that they believe there is no Constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry — but ultimately, this issue is likely to be democratically decided on a state-by-state basis, and either way, since Obama isn’t on the Supreme Court, his view on the constitutionality of opposite-sex-only marriage laws is far less significant than his view on whether marriage laws should include same-sex couples. That both the current Democratic President and the prior GOP Vice President are now on record favoring same-sex marriage can only help this important cause.

UPDATE II: A commenter eloquently explains several key points:

I’m generally no fan of Obama, and many of the reasons why are reported regularly in Glenn’s blog. . . .

On this issue, Obama’s statement today will be remembered 20 years from now, while his motives, and the North Carolina vote yesterday, and Biden’s carefully calibrated statement last week, and Obama’s previous dithering on this issue, will be long forgotten. A sitting President of the United States is willing, for the first time, to personally back basic civil rights for people who love others of the same sex. That is an action. It’s mostly symbolic, sure, but it will mean a whole lot to a whole lot of people.

I’m old enough to remember eight years of Ronald Reagan not once mentioning the AIDS pandemic while it raged. Any queer or queer ally who lived through that era will instantly recognize today’s significance. That was less than 25 years ago. To get from there to this is remarkable.

No, today’s statement doesn’t get any legislation passed (at least, not directly), and the states’ rights hedge is a copout. But the important takeaway is that marriage equality opponents, and homophobes in general, can no longer dismiss gay civil rights as a fringe concern, and the notion that we can be separated from the fabric of American life and be shunned, buried, and forgotten is officially dead.

Eventually, marriage equality and all those other civil and social rights straight people take for granted will become the law of the land and the norm for everyone. Today helps get us there. That’s worth celebrating no matter how many odious other things Obama’s done.

In Salon yesterday, Edmund White similarly wrote:

As a man in his 70s, I grew up in an era when homosexuality was still an offense in some states punishable by death. The stigma of being gay drove my age-mates and me toward drink, suicide and years on the psychoanalytic couch in an effort to go straight. We were wracked with self-hatred, which blighted so many lives of our friends.

Same-sex marriage is a balm to the soul whether it’s an option that an individual embraces or not. The idea that our relationships could be normalized is such a happy sign for those of us who grew up feeling alienated from society and like second-class citizens. The battle is not yet won, but the president’s stand points the way toward success.

There’s no denying that this is a significant event that moves the nation closer to equality for millions of people who have long been denied it in countless damaging ways. That’s an important, and positive, step no matter what else is true about Obama and no matter what else he has done.