Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a “job creator” rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he’s regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the “liberal” President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney’s gambit work?
Of course not, but Mitt’s not giving up.
In Lansing, Mich. last week, Romney derided Obama as an “old school liberal” compared to Clinton, who he called a “new Democrat.” Where Clinton “said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance,” Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama “really turned his back” on Clinton’s policies, including welfare reform and middle class tax cuts.
Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 recovery act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.
On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.
According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”
There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.
Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”
As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member. He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)
Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax-credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.
It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans half way, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.
What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.
But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.
Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the Whtie House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):
When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.
Former Obama auto “czar” Steve Rattner stepped on his old boss’s message a little Monday morning, telling the folks on “Morning Joe” that President Obama’s just-released ad blasting Mitt Romney’s Bain career was “unfair.” As Rattner explained: “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors.” Rattner is a big Democratic Party donor who worked at Lehman Brothers before starting his own private equity firm, Quadrangle (where he was accused of participating in a New York state pension fund kickback scheme and paid millions of dollars in settlements without admitting wrongdoing).
Rattner’s reaction to Obama’s tough Bain ad shows why Democrats have had a hard time capitalizing on anti-Wall Street sentiment among worried, screwed-over American voters: because for the last 20 years, at least, they’ve too often done Wall Street’s bidding almost as reliably as the GOP.
But Obama is to be praised for his aggressive rollout of RomneyEconomics.com, which features the new ads. The president is going to have a problem with voters who are not seeing signs of the economic recovery, particularly working-class whites who didn’t go to college. He probably can’t win a majority, but he has to defend his margin in 2008, when he did better with that group than John Kerry or Al Gore before him. He may not be able to do much before the election to make those voters feel less economic pain, but he can make clear that Romney would only make their pain worse. Because that’s what he’s done his whole career.
Obama’s new ad released Monday, which will run in the swing states of Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado, features laid-off workers from GST Steel in Kansas City describing how Romney’s Bain Capital acquired their employer and gutted it. GST went into bankruptcy in 2001, throwing 750 employees out of work with no health benefits and reduced pensions. Ultimately the federal government had to spend $44 million to bail out its pension fund. But Bain made $12 million on its original $8 million investment, along with another $4.5 million in “consulting fees.” This wasn’t an unusual situation for Bain: 22 percent of the company’s investments ultimately wound up in bankruptcy, but the company made healthy profits and consulting fees nonetheless.
“Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off this plant,” steel worker John Wiseman says. “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer.”
If that sounds familiar, that’s because Republican primary opponents Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry made similar charges against Romney. Obama’s ad accuses him of “vampire capitalism”; Perry accused him of “vulture capitalism.” Either one works for me. But the class warfare appeal didn’t seem to work in the GOP primary, where party leaders were more concerned about protecting business than trying to fake populism, and smacked down Gingrich and Perry for emulating Obama’s rhetoric. Will it work in November?
I think it will, as long as Obama combines it with practical proposals to ease the unemployment and underemployment crisis. One Wall Street Journal story that didn’t get enough attention last week found that if it wasn’t for public sector layoffs, the nation’s unemployment rate would be at roughly 7 percent. And those layoffs have been concentrated in red states, particularly Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Florida, where high-profile GOP governors have been spreading the pain on a state level that Paul Ryan would like to extend nationally. The nation’s unemployment crisis is at least partly a Republican production.
The economy is all Romney has against Obama. Just Monday morning, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul falsely but energetically claimed that “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.” They’re brazen; they’ll keep repeating that without evidence. The most recent Gallup poll shows that 61 percent of voters say Romney would do a “good or very good job” with the economy if elected president. The CBS/New York Times poll released Monday showed Romney up over Obama by 3 points, with voters saying the economy was the most important issue to them. (The poll needs an asterisk because it’s following up with an earlier group of voters previously sampled, and only got in touch with two-thirds of them, which some analysts say could skew the results.)
But most voters haven’t tuned in to the presidential campaign yet. It’s important that Obama help those voters understand that Romney’s touted “experience” with the economy has more to do with job destruction than creation. The Obama ad features Romney saying, “I know why jobs come and why they go.” That last part is true. He certainly knows “why jobs go”: because guys like him make a fortune eliminating them.
I talked about the president’s new Bain Capital ad focus with Rep. Chaka Fattah on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” with Rev. Al Sharpton:
John Roberts (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The most important revelation in Jeffrey Toobin’s 10,000-word New Yorker piece on Chief Justice John Roberts’ takedown of campaign finance laws in the Citizens United case is the extent to which modern conservatism is trying to restore the Gilded Age. That was a time when corporations had more rights than individuals, when a conservative Supreme Court did its best to protect those corporate rights, and wealth and corruption ran unchecked. Of course, we live in a neo-Gilded Age, when income inequality is more pronounced than at any time since the Great Depression, and the Roberts court’s decisions in the Citizens United case helps bring us all the way back to those bad old days.
Much is being made of Toobin’s revelations about the dramatic internal political divisions and infighting within the court triggered by the CU decision (more on that later). But what I think is most politically significant in Toobin’s piece is that it shows the dramatic rightward – and backward — march of Republicanism over the last 30 years. In January 1982, Ronald Reagan famously wrote in his diary, “The press is trying to paint me as trying to undo the New Deal … I’m trying to undo the Great Society.” Reagan was anxious to unravel the anti-poverty programs Lyndon Johnson pushed into place (though not Medicare), but he collaborated with House Speaker Tip O’Neill to pass payroll tax increases to stabilize Social Security for the next 50 to 60 years.
Today’s Tea Party, of course, is going after what’s left of the Great Society and the New Deal too, trying to privatize Medicare and Social Security and undo the labor protections passed by Congress and many states in the wake of the Great Depression. But the Roberts court wants to go back even further, to the Progressive Era, when some politicians in both parties recognized that the omnipotence of Gilded Age robber barons had to be curbed – and that campaign finance regulation was a good place to start.
Back then a conservative Supreme Court majority also disagreed with that Progressive reform push. In an 1886 tax case it first held that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection laws applied to corporations. In its 1905 Lochner ruling, striking down a New York law limiting bakery workers to a six-day 60-hour week, it declared such regulations a breach of contract rights, an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” As Toobin observes, “In simple terms, the majority in Lochner turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners.”
Progressive era reform also included campaign finance regulation, starting with the 1907 Tillman Act, which prevented corporations from directly contributing to campaigns. The Court let the act stand, but over the years a series of rulings by conservative majorities have managed to establish that money is “speech,” and though contributions could be regulated, expenditures – speech – could not.
Toobin shows decisively that the court could have kept its decision on Citizens United quite narrow. Attorney Theodore Olson wasn’t seeking to strike down McCain-Feingold, but to clarify that it applied to television commercials, not to 90-minute political “documentaries” such as “Hillary: The Movie” (a shriekingly negative “documentary” on the woman who was expected to be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee). But in oral arguments the conservative justices sought to broaden their purview, and Roberts helped them along. “As the Chief Justice chose how broadly to change the law in this area, the real question for him, it seems, was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party,” Toobin writes. “Roberts’s choice was: a lot.”
After taking a shot at drafting the CU ruling himself, he later assigned it to “swing vote” Anthony Kennedy, whose views on campaign finance regulation reliably put him with the conservative majority. Assigned to write the dissent, outgoing Justice David Souter accused Roberts “of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted,” Toobin says. That’s when Roberts took the extraordinary step of asking that CU be re-argued – though with five justices already committed to a sweeping attack on McCain-Feingold, the outcome of those re-arguments were never really in doubt.
And indeed, Kennedy again wound up writing the majority opinion, which found that “The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations” since 1886, and that in McCain-Feingold “the Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” It’s unclear from the context whether Kennedy is saying what he seems to be – that corporations “best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”
Justice John Paul Stevens, a moderate Republican once on the court’s more conservative end, wrote in his dissenting opinion, “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” Stevens’s dissent continued for a record 90 pages.
At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
Toobin’s conclusion is no less scathing: “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”
It’s worth noting that the most spirited opposition to Citizens United is coming from Montana, where the ties between Gilded Age corporate abuse and campaign finance regulation are perhaps the most explicit. Copper mining interests essentially owned the state in the late 19th and early 20th century, but Montana Progressives pushed a tough campaign finance law as a way of clawing back control of their state from the “copper kings,” who Mark Twain wrote “bought judges and legislatures as other men buy food and raiment.” Montana’s state Supreme Court upheld that 1912 “Corrupt Practices Act” in January, putting the state on a collision course with SCOTUS. Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been one of the most articulate voices against Citizens United, and supports a state ballot initiative that would ban corporate money in politics and make it state policy that corporations are not people.
“Montana’s going first, but we have before,” Schweitzer told the Huffington Post earlier this month. “It was Montana in 1912 that banned corporate money from our elections. We don’t mind leading and we believe it has to start somewhere. This business of allowing corporations to bribe their way into government has got to stop.”
But in a world where the Citizens United decision is precedent, it’s hard to imagine that ballot measure surviving a legal challenge. Toobin’s piece makes clear the stakes in the 2012 presidential race as vividly as anything else does: American democracy can’t survive the appointment of more justices like Roberts, Sam Alito and Antonin Scalia, who mainly serve the interests of corporate America. Mitt “Corporations are people, too, my friend” Romney can be expected to give them company in the years to come if he wins the White House.
It’s not precisely the same as Gary Hart daring reporters to follow him, when faced with Donna Rice rumors back in 1988, and then getting caught in an affair. But when Ann Romney pointed to her husband’s fun-and-games prankster high school days to show us “the real Mitt,” she made those years even more interesting and relevant to political reporters, and potentially to voters. “I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy,” she told the CBS “Early Show” 10 days ago. “There’s a wild and crazy man in there.”
The right wing is now trying to accuse Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz of an oppo-research operation, but his meticulously reported and well-sourced story of Romney’s prep-school bullying, including two cases involving gay classmates, won’t be destroyed by the noise machine.
What’s giving the story legs isn’t merely the homophobic hair-cutting episode, which a lawyer friend of Romney’s termed “assault and battery,” not “hijinks.” It’s Romney’s callous reaction. His campaign first tried to shrug off the story with an insincere non-apology, but when the details of Horowitz’s tale got people’s attention – the “terrified” classmate John Lauber “with tears in his eyes” as Romney chopped off his hair with a scissor; the callow preppie leading a sight-impaired teacher into a set of closed doors – the candidate made his own statement. And what a statement it was.
After Fox’s Brian Kilmeade shared the Lauber story, Romney actually chuckled, and said:
You know, I don’t, I don’t remember that incident. I’ll tell you, I certainly don’t believe that I or – I can’t speak for others – thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds in the 1960s.
You really have to listen to it to hear that the callow preppie hasn’t changed much in 50 years. As I noted yesterday, it’s rather brazen to say he doesn’t “remember that incident,” but to immediately volunteer that he didn’t think “the fellow was homosexual.” How could Lauber’s being gay have anything to do with an incident he says he doesn’t remember?
The other way his answer hurts him is that it seems to have riled up the friends who told Horowitz the story. After 50 years, they all confessed that the incident made them feel guilty, but Romney says he doesn’t remember it?
The pro-Obama PAC American Bridge is using the incident in a campaign video it called “Mitt Gets Worse,” a play on the moving series of famous folks reassuring gay teens “It Gets Better.” I don’t think we should judge Romney’s actions of 50 years ago with the exact same values society has evolved to hold today. But I do think we should judge his reaction to the story with those values. At a time when we know bullying of any kind, but particularly homophobic bullying, can leave lasting scars and even lead to suicide, Romney’s non-apology shows he has an empathy problem, plain and simple.
I’ll be debating the issue on “Hardball” with former RNC chairman Michael Steele. In the meantime, here’s the “Mitt Gets Worse” video.
Mitt Romney in 1962 (inset) and Cranbrook Tower and Quadrangle
(Credit: AP/Wikipedia)
(Updated below)
Last week we learned about President Obama’s first post-college romantic relationships. This week, we’re discovering details of Mitt Romney’s prep-school sadism. While I think we should tread carefully when examining the youthful experiences and mistakes of both presidential candidates, I thought Obama’s romantic past was fair game in Vanity Fair. I think the Washington Post’s well-reported feature on Young Mr. Romney’s entitled cruelty to gay classmates and a disabled teacher is even more revealing and important.
The Post has four named sources and a fifth who stayed anonymous to recount an incident in which Romney gathered a “posse” to forcibly cut the hair of a gay-seeming classmate:
Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
That’s assault, people.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” Cranbrook wrestling champion John Buford told the Post. He later apologized to Lauber, who he said was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.” Another classmate ran into Lauber, who later came out as gay, and apologized in the 1990s. “It was horrible.” Lauber told him. “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.” The bullied classmate died in 2004, with his thinning hair still blonde. “He never stopped bleaching it,” his sister told the Post.
Lauber wasn’t the only gay student bullied by Romney. Gary Hummel, who was closeted, recalled that Romney mocked his efforts to speak out in class by shouting, “Atta girl!” He pulled several pranks on a teacher with seriously compromised eyesight, once “escorting” him into a closed set of doors and “giggling hysterically” when he ran into them. Another time he propped up the back axle of the teacher’s VW bug and laughed as the man hit the gas pedal “with his wheels spinning in the air.” Hilarious!
In a hastily scheduled interview with a friendly Fox host, Romney made this statement: “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.” He sort of said he didn’t remember assaulting Lauber. “I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. (Laughing?) “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.” So he obviously remembers something – but he didn’t know the guy was gay! About taunting Gary Hummel with “Atta girl,” Romney offers a similar qualified denial: “I really can’t remember that. As this person indicated, he was closeted. I had no idea that he was gay and can’t speak to that even today.” So I didn’t do it, and anyway, the guy was closeted. Romney closed with the classic non-apology apology: ”If there’s anything I said that is offensive to someone, I certainly am sorry for that, very deeply sorry for that.”
I’m not sure what’s worse – that he remembers his cruel pranks, and he’s lying about it, or that such cruelty doesn’t stand out in his memory. It’s all of a piece with Romney’s cavalier statements about power and entitlement: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me;” joking to a group of unemployed voters that he’s “unemployed” too; the $10,000 bet with Rick Perry; his statement the other day that retirees “can’t begin to live off the puny interest from their CDs.” He’s still the same entitled rich kid, the one whose classmate told the Post he thought deserved some punishment in the Lauber incident – punishment that of course never came. No wonder the story of poor Seamus on the roof of the car never goes away: we have stories of Mechanical Mitt, and Mean Mitt, and very few of Mitt as a man who shows genuine empathy to people (or other living beings) less powerful than he is.
One Obama-Romney parallel is striking. On Wednesday President Obama hastily schedules an interview to announce that he supports gay marriage. On Thursday Romney hastily schedules an interview to say he can’t remember assaulting one gay student and insulting another. That’s a pretty stark choice right there.
Update: This is rich: Some of Romney’s school-days friends are being asked by the campaign to step forward and defend him from the Washington Post story charges – and they’re balking. Stu White told ABC News that he is “still debating” whether he will help, addding, “It’s been a long time since we’ve been pals.”
Another classmate and old friend of Romney’s told ABC “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior there. He described it as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.” The classmate, who wouldn’t be named, says Romney is lying when he says he can’t remember the hair-cutting incident.
“It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?” the former classmate said.
And another classmate, Phillip Maxwell, who witnessed the hair-cutting incident, told CBS today: “Mitt was a prankster, there’s no doubt about it. This thing with Lauber wasn’t a prank. This was, well, as a lawyer, it was an assault. It was an assault and a battery. And I’m sure that John Lauber carried it with him for the rest of his life.”
It seems like Romney’s glib dismissal of the story is bothering his old friends. Stay tuned; Romney’s going to have to say more about this soon. A lawyer just termed it “assault.”
>Make no mistake: President Obama’s decision to publicly endorse gay marriage carries serious political risk, though also moral reward. Every state gay-marriage ban referendum has passed, except one in Arizona that was rewritten and adopted on a second try. And in swing states, from North Carolina (which just banned both marriage and civil unions Tuesday) to Nevada to Virginia, the president’s stance could cost him votes.
The latest Gallup poll shows that public opinion has gotten a little cooler toward gay marriage in just the last year, though most Americans support it. The sad truth is, most Americans may back it, but those who oppose it have been far more motivated to cast votes based on their animus, so far anyway.
That said, it was the right and necessary thing for the president to do. Future generations will look back and wonder what took him so long. The president believes in the saying attributed Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Despite his too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, Obama knows the arc bends faster when we pull on it, and today he gave it a good tug.
Like Vice President Joe Biden, who clearly deserves credit for accelerating this public “evolution,” Obama cast his decision in personal terms, telling ABC’s Robin Roberts:
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, 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.
Cynics are already saying that Obama’s decision is pegged to big fundraisers in Hollywood and New York over the next few days. I honestly think the risk is higher than the reward, and the president made a personal decision. “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” isn’t the most stirring call to justice, but it sounds honest to me.
I remember thinking Mayor Gavin Newsom was doing a politically dangerous thing when he began marrying couples at San Francisco City Hall in 2003. Then I went and watched the weddings – and I was converted to the notion that there can be no compromise on marriage rights. Fellow Democrats blamed Newsom for costing John Kerry the election the next November, and no one can say for certain that he didn’t. Karl Rove surely used gay marriage as a wedge issue in 2004, pushing ballot initiatives in swing states to beef up the GOP’s Christian right turnout. And yet once I saw real individuals joyous at their weddings – and later crushed when the wedding spree was ended by the courts – it became impossible for me to suggest they have to wait because the country isn’t ready to give them equal rights. After he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously told Bill Moyers “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
But no person of conscience would today suggest Johnson did the wrong thing. “I had assumed that civil unions might have been enough,” Obama told Roberts. He did not say how long ago he realized he was wrong; it’s enough that he realized it today.
By all accounts Joe Biden did bend the arc of justice a little, with what are being called spontaneous and unplanned remarks on “Meet the Press” Sunday supporting gay marriage. The Catholic Biden, like Obama, put his evolution in very personal terms. “The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love?” he told David Gregory. “Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about.”
Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. Jay Carney faced 50 gay-marriage questions in Monday’s briefing, after Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined Biden in supporting gay marriage on “Morning Joe.” The White House’s brief effort to deny the importance of Biden’s statement was futile and they wisely dropped it. Then they did more than that – they endorsed it.
Obama’s move may be less risky than it feels right now: Public Policy Polling has found that folks who oppose gay marriage already think the president supports it, anyway. African-Americans are less likely to support gay marriage than other groups, yet it’s hard to imagine Obama’s stance depressing black support for him given everything else that’s at stake in 2012.
I also want to say a word on behalf of the advocacy community that pushed the president to take this step – even as fervent Obama supporters insisted they were dooming the president’s reelection bid with their demands. Activists and agitators make history. Leaders rarely move to claim risky but necessary territory on their own. Congratulations to all the voices who made this happen – and to the president, who must be relieved to be able to say publicly what we’ve known he’s believed privately for a long time.
Joan Walsh joined Salon in 1998 to become the first full-time news editor and became editor in chief in February 2005. At the end of 2010, she became editor at large, to write full time. In the last couple of years she's had the privilege of debating conservative zealots on
TV, from Bill O' Reilly to Dick Armey to Pat Buchanan.
As a columnist for San Francisco Magazine, she won Western Magazine Awards in 2004 and 2005 for writing about local politics. She's written for everyone from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post to Vogue and the Nation.
Before she joined Salon, Joan spent many years as a freelancer. She also ran her own business, consulting to national foundations and nonprofits on education, community development and urban poverty issues. She's a crazy San Francisco Giants fan and co-wrote a book about the ballpark back in 2001.
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters) 
John Roberts (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong) 
Mitt Romney in 1962 (inset) and Cranbrook Tower and Quadrangle
(Credit: AP/Wikipedia) 
(Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas) 