By Rob Janicki
t's not often that I can put together an article that is both informative and amusing to me on a personal level. Here it is for today. After Slow Joe Biden's gaffe on Sunday, outing President Obama as a supporter of gay marriage, and then passage of North Carolina's constitutional amendment, prohibiting gay marriage, on Tuesday, we all now know that President Obama came out publicly in support of gay marriage the next day, Wednesday. He subtly added that he thought gay marriage should be determined by each state. In essence he distanced himself from any responsibility for actually proposing and pushing for federal law actually legalizing gay marriage, by carving out the caveat that it should be done at the state level by passage of law or constitutional amendment.
We now understand the several disparate elements that went into the timing of Obama's announcement. First, Obama quickly realized that Biden's gaffe was going to cause ongoing problems in his presidential campaign going forward if he did not act to cut off criticism by some manner or means. The next element had to do with the timing of a response. And it's here that Obama and his advisers had a stroke of good luck with North Carolina's constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. It was luck meeting the opportunity to use the North Carolina amendment for political cover. It was the perfect storm, if you will and it may have worked, except it has driven critics of Obama to document his many different and conflicting positions on gay marriage since 1996.
What we also have, and this is amusing to me, is that there is now a call for the Democrat National Committee to move their scheduled presidential convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, to some other location. The choice of North Carolina for the DNC presidential convention was based upon the fact that North Carolina was considered an important battleground state in the November election. With 61% of North Carolinians voting for the ban on gay marriage, the left wing of the party now views North Carolina as a losing battleground for them and as such it would be a waste of campaign resources to be poured into the state.
What I haven't touched on is the affect Obama's comments have made on the liberal gay community and Obama's campaign funding. It is being reported that the Obama campaign received $1 million dollars in contributions within the first 90 minutes of Obama's announcement supporting gay marriage in principle. This was the up side to Obama's decision to go public in support of gay marriage. That said, the fact remained that the gay community was already becoming very restless to the point of diminishing campaign contributions and threats of the gay community to withdraw from active support of Obama's campaign. Obama, then, moved when he did, to bring the gay community back into the fold for their financial support and their community activism in the campaign. And that, boys and girls, are at some of the more significant elements that went into Obama's decision model to come out in support of gay marriage at this particular point in time.
It is always about money, and this time O needs as much, or more, than he can round up. We have another five months to go, and his wells could go into drought/dry mode. Then where will he get the dollars to deny the personal homosexual charges which are going to come his way?
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