Politico is reporting Vice President Joseph Biden forced President Obama to speak out publicly about supporting same-marriage. However, the vice-president’s timing may not have been synched up with the president’s on when to make his views public:
Obama’s interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts capped a frenetic half-week of backstage political maneuvering after Biden said he was “comfortable” with gay marriage during a TV interview that was taped Friday and aired Sunday. It followed the passage Tuesday of an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in North Carolina that illustrated the divisions in typically cohesive Obama constituencies, including women, Hispanics and blacks. And it exposed a few divisions in the Obama-Biden camp.
Senior administration officials admit that Biden’s comment was, indeed, the catalyst for Obama to make his historic announcement weeks earlier than planned.
But Biden’s remarks on “Meet the Press” deeply annoyed Obama’s team, people close to the situation tell POLITICO, because it aggrandized his role at the expense of Obama’s yeoman efforts on behalf of the community and pushed up the timing of a sensitive announcement they had hoped to break — at a time and place of their own choosing — in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this fall.
Nor did it tickle anyone, from Obama on down, that Biden — who backed the Defense of Marriage Act while serving in the Senate in the 1990s — seemed to be getting more credit in the LGBT community than a president who has actually taken steps to repeal the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as something that could only take place between a man and a woman.
And it chafed Obama’s team that Biden had, at times, privately argued for the president to hold off on his support of marriage equality to avoid a backlash among Catholic voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to two officials familiar with those discussions.
“I don’t know what kind of message [Obama] was trying to send,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Republican, I just assume that anything that the president does is done for political purposes. Her state passed a constitutional amendment on earlier in the week that bans same sex marriage in the state.
Democrats continue to have conflicts within North Carolina from it’s right to work status to scandal happening within the Democratic state party. Rep. Foxx referred to a piece written by Stu Rothenberg questioning if Democrats are regretting the choice of North Carolina as a convention site.
One thing is for sure, however, the Obama campaign is feeling a difference with Vice President Joe Biden built into the ticket as opposed to becoming part of the campaign when there was already upward acceleration from Obama himself in 2008.
