If Joe Biden didn’t exist, it would be necessary for the White House to create him.
By the nature of the job, a vice president serves as the president’s foil. In the case of our sitting vice president, even his flubs can serve the purpose. Like the rodeo clown sent in to distract the bull when a rider has fallen, a Biden gaffe has often drawn press attention away from the less winsome aspects of his boss’ practices and policies.
This is precisely what is happening now with the “news” that, as Politico puts it, “Vice President Joe Biden really did get ahead of President Barack Obama on accepting gay marriage in May 2012 — and the White House really wasn’t happy about it.”
The message comes via Jo Becker’s new book, “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Gay Marriage.” A fascinating excerpt in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the turmoil Biden loosed in the West Wing when he came out for gay marriage on national TV. This at a time when the president and his campaign team worried that coming clean on the issue might cost him his re-election.
After the White House got hold of the “Meet the Press” transcript, reports Becker, presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett let it be known she thought the veep guilty of “disloyalty.” Campaign officials were “agitated.” Eventually, she says, it forced the president’s hand: In an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, President Obama came out himself for gay marriage. Of course, even then he hedged, adding this was his personal view.
The frantic White House maneuvering Biden provoked with his unscripted remarks makes for illuminating reading. Still, the most telling sentence in Becker’s dispatch is this one:
“Despite the president’s stated opposition, even his top advisers didn’t believe he truly opposed allowing gay couples to marry.”
Here’s another non-news flash: No one in the press corps believed it either. Still, the president was largely given a pass because this was regarded as one of those things he had to say lest he rile up the yahoos.
In fact, Obama’s position on gay marriage had always been a mass of evasions. He supported it when he ran for the Illinois state Senate in 1996, checked “undecided” two years later when he ran for re-election and then (in his runs for both the US Senate and the presidency) said he favored civil unions instead. At the time Biden blurted out his opinion to David Gregory, the president’s official line was that as a practicing Christian he believed marriage was a sacred union between a man and a woman — but also that his views were “constantly evolving.”
They certainly were, in the sense that “evolving” meant a cold calculation about when it might be politically safe to go public with his true views. Turns out this would be when he no longer had to answer to voters. As Michelle Obama put it to one activist in 2011, “Hang in there with us, and we’ll be with you after the election.”
Which also explains why the White House was so furious with Biden for expressing a position that all of them held, including the president. Again, Becker explains the dynamic:
“Caught between countervailing political forces, Obama called his top aides together and said that if asked again for his position, he both wanted and needed to drop the pretense and tell people where he really stood.
“‘The politics of authenticity — not just the politics, but his own sense of authenticity — required that he finally step forward,’ [adviser David] Axelrod said. ‘And the president understood that.’”
Dwell on that for a moment. The president of the United States decides to stop saying what he doesn’t believe and start saying what he does. He does this not because it’s the right thing to do but because of a political need to look authentic.
Come to think of it, not unlike his Afghanistan policy.
In 2008 Obama had campaigned on the theme Iraq had been a war of choice that distracted us from the “necessary” war we needed to win in Afghanistan. But after declaring at West Point “our cause is just, our resolve unwavering” as he announced his surge of troops to Afghanistan, his own defense secretary concluded President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy.”
In The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner comes much closer to the truth about the president’s “evolution” toward support for gay marriage when he says some of the details of Obama’s “halting, insincere” shift are “cringe-inducing.” He’s right about that.
But what’s most cringe-inducing is the way the national press corps went along — not because they thought the president was telling the truth about his opposition to gay marriage but because they were confident he wasn’t.