Cover story on Yahoo: "How will gay marriage impact the election?"
It's pathetic to see the President so desperate as to reach out for
the gutter vote. This after the Slut vote. Next He'll have to do.
Our President is a low life
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Obama supports gay marriage: How will it affect his re-election
campaign?
By Olivier Knox
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-supports-gay-marriage-affect-election-campaign-185836746.html
President Barack Obama's history-making embrace of gay marriage could
send far-reaching political aftershocks through a presidential
campaign defined by voter concerns about the economy but likely
decided by slivers of the electorate in a handful of battleground
states.
"The politics, it's not clear how they cut in some places that are
going to be pretty important in this electoral map. It may hurt me,"
Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News in an exclusive interview
Wednesday as he announced his change of heart. "I believe marriage is
a relationship between a man and a woman," presumptive Republican
nominee Mitt Romney said as he campaigned in Oklahoma.
A Democratic senator who supports Obama's re-election as well as gay
marriage told Yahoo News that the president could face "significant
electoral risk" if his announcement is merely a check-the-box exercise
with no follow-through.
"If the president simply makes an important commitment to equality and
moves on, and does not challenge the network of people nationally,
activists and others, who favor marriage equality, to speak up from
now through the election, he is taking a significant electoral risk,"
said the senator, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified
by name.
"When you move from 'civil union' to the word 'marriage,' it reaches
people differently," the senator said in a telephone interview,
warning that highly motivated foes of gay marriage will unleash a
campaign of "public speeches, sermons, newsletters, websites, that
will darkly suggest a negative future."
Obama echoed that sentiment, telling ABC News: "I had hesitated on gay
marriage in part because I thought civil unions would be sufficient,
that that was something that would give people hospital visitation
rights and other elements that we take for granted, and I was
sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, you know, the word
'marriage' was something that evokes very powerful traditions,
religious beliefs, and so forth."
Richard Socarides, a leading gay activist who served as President Bill
Clinton's top adviser on issues like same-sex marriage, said Obama
"can help build a national consensus."
"Nobody expects the president to make this a central feature of his
presidency, but it is an important issue," Socarides told Yahoo News
by telephone.
Other Obama supporters pointed to a Gallup national poll, released
Tuesday, showing that the country has been "evolving" on the issue
along with the president.
The public opposed gay marriage by a lopsided margin of 68 percent to
27 percent when Gallup first asked the question in 1996. In 2012, for
just the second year, a narrow majority of 50 percent favored making
it legal, with 48 percent against. (The margin of error was plus or
minus 3 percentage points.) Independent voters were strongly in favor,
57 percent to 40 percent, which on the surface would seem to help the
embattled incumbent.
In what both sides expect to be a hotly contested election, the
outcome could turn on relatively few voters in up-for-grabs
states—like North Carolina, which voted 61 percent to 39 percent
Tuesday to adopt a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and
civil unions. Obama beat John McCain there by just 13,692 ballots in
2008, and he leads Mitt Romney by 2.4 percentage points according to a
Real Clear Politics average of polls.
"It was important for me, given how much attention this issue was
getting—both here in Washington but elsewhere—for me to go ahead,
let's be clear, here's what I believe," Obama told ABC News.
"But I'm not going to be spending most of my time talking about this,
because frankly my job as president right now, my biggest priority, is
to make sure that we're growing the economy, that we're putting people
back to work, that we're managing the draw-down in Afghanistan
effectively," he said. "Those are the things that I'm going to focus
on."
One in 6 of the Obama campaign's "bundlers"—who corral big money
donors—is gay, according to the Washington Post.
There is little evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that coming
out in favor of gay marriage will cost Obama much support among black
voters.
But political analysts also point to working-class, white, religious
voters in pivotal states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and
conservative-leaning independents in other important states like Iowa
and Nevada as potentially put off by Obama's new position.
[Related: Join the debate about gay marriage]
"African-American voters, who tend to be less sympathetic to gay
marriage than white voters, are very enthused about Obama and, I
think, this won't change that," said Ohio State University political
science professor Paul Allen Beck .
"But the question in places like Ohio will be how this affects
blue-collar white voters who might otherwise be predisposed to vote
Democratic. For some of them, particularly the ones who are more
deeply religious, this could be important," Beck told Yahoo News.
"For almost all Americans, this won't be directly a factor in
November. But elections are won and lost at the margins, especially in
Ohio," Beck said.
Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey's re-election fight highlights
the difficult balancing act for politicians in swing states. Casey
opposes gay marriage but favors allowing civil unions. His Republican
opponent, Tom Smith, would favor a constitutional amendment defining
marriage as between a man and a woman, but would not support a ban on
civil unions, Smith's campaign manager Jim Conroy told Yahoo News by
telephone.
But the Obama campaign may have calculated that the president's
waffling—it could no longer be dubbed "Clintonian" after Bill Clinton
actively campaigned against the North Carolina amendment—would tarnish
his "hope and change" brand and dampen enthusiasm among liberal
Democrats, young voters and single women, all key parts of his winning
coalition in 2008.
"They ripped off the Band-Aid, didn't they?" a Democratic
congressional aide told Yahoo News, saying that Vice President Joe
Biden's endorsement of same-sex marriage on "Meet The Press" Sunday
had forced the White House to confront "head-on" an issue it had hoped
not to take up.
Speaking to reporters after a campaign event in Oklahoma City, Romney
said his position on same sex marriage was unchanged.
"I have the same view on marriage that I had when I was governor. I
believe marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman," Romney
said. "I have the same view I've had since, well, running for office."
Conservative activist Ralph Reed, now head of the Faith And Freedom
Coalition, predicted that Obama's decision would fire up conservative
voters.
"This is an unanticipated gift to the Romney campaign. It is certain
to fuel a record turnout of voters of faith to the polls this
November," he said in a statement on the group's Facebook page.
And Brad Dayspring, a shrewd former aide to House Republican Majority
Leader Eric Cantor now advising a conservative super PAC, accused
Obama of trying to use a "culture war" to distract voters from the
sour economy.
"Once again the President refuses to put economy and jobs first. All
of our focus should start there," Dayspring said on Twitter.
In 1996, Obama said on a campaign questionnaire in Illinois, "I favor
legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit
such marriages." White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer
later disavowed that statement, saying "someone else, not the
president" had filled it out.
As president, Obama signed a law repealing the "don't ask, don't tell"
ban on openly gay servicemembers, and ordered his administration to
stop defending in court the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits
the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions.
"My feelings about this are constantly evolving," Obama told reporters
at a press conference one month after Republicans romped in the
November 2010 midterm elections.
"I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me,
who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And
they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot
to them and they care deeply about," Obama said.
He went on to say: "At this point, what I've said is, is that my
baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections
and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think—and I
think that's the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their
perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we're
going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to
wrestle with going forward."
People in Ohio have been "evolving" on the issue, too, said Beck, the
political scientist. Ohio "public opinion probably has changed, as it
has nationally," he said.
But "how much it has changed, I don't know."
CB
By their fruits you shall know them--The White House and Christ
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
In Matthew 7:15-16, Jesus warns, "Beware of false prophets, which come
to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye
shall know them by their fruits."
http://prophecyfrombillwilsontoday.blogspot.com/2011/04/by-their-fruits-you-shall-know-them.html