Will the real Barack Obama please stand up?
I haven’t the time or interest to wade through the entirety of this NY Times Magazine article on how Barack Obama’s views on gay marriage “evolved”; I merely briefly skimmed the first third of it. But Ann Althouse has done the heavy lifting and extracted this quote:
Despite the president’s stated opposition, even his top advisers didn’t believe that he truly opposed allowing gay couples to marry. “He has never been comfortable with his position,” David Axelrod, then one of his closest aides, told me….
“The politics of authenticity ”” not just the politics, but his own sense of authenticity ”” required that he finally step forward,” Axelrod said. “And the president understood that.”
So, let’s see if I got this straight. Everybody knew Obama was lying about his stated opposition to gay marriage, and that the lie was a strategic one in order to gain votes during a time when gay marriage wasn’t all that popular. But later on, when he dropped his pose, Axelrod would have us think that it was because Obama’s such an honest-type guy that he just couldn’t stand being inauthentic a single moment longer. And it was just an accident that he would now probably gain more political points than he would lose for supporting gay marriage.
It was all about the authenticity. Got it.
To its credit, the Times piece reveals how Obama weighed the political expediency of his choice to come out on the subject. His decision seems to have rested on (as I suspected at the time, because it was rather obvious) his need to shore up the under-30 vote and get out the base for the 2012 election. And the article also goes into how Byzantine Obama’s “evolution” on the subject of gay marriage has been: he was for it (in 1996) before he was “undecided” (in 2000) before he was against it (in 2008) citing his “Christian faith” as the cause of his opposition. Then somehow prior to the 2012 election he suddenly found gay marriage compatible with that faith.
But was there anyone on either side, liberal or conservative, supporter or opponent, who ever thought Obama’s 2008 opposition to gay marriage was authentic in the first place? Lies of that sort are so common among politicians that this one didn’t really draw a whole lot of fire, even from the right. And when Obama flip-flopped once again on the issue (the familiarity of that term underscoring how very widespread the practice is) it seemed almost inevitable, didn’t it?
But to claim the whole reversal was in some sort of service to authenticity is rich. Obama would have gone on being “inauthentic” without batting an eye if he’d thought it politically expedient to do so. The audacity of this claim of authenticity as Obama’s motive is what’s so special about the Obama phenomenon—his tendency to cloak himself in the mantle of sanctimonious righteousness while simultaneously being one of the more coldly duplicitous presidents in history.
I find the POTUS to be a very authentic person whose public pronouncements are guided by by one principle: political gain.
Several days before the POTUS came out for gay marriage, some gay PAC complained about his non-support for gay marriage, with the implication being that campaign donations were at stake.
Basically Obama had lied about everything important and was willing to say anything to win two elections.
What a surprise.
It’s so quintessentially Leftist: the end ALWAYS justifies the means, right? Gotta break those eggs to make the omelet. I agree with Gringo: Pres. Obama is 100% authentic all the time, as long as you’re looking at the one thing that matters to him: political primacy. Every other thing is only important as far as it helps him achieve that goal, and therefore everything he does in service of that goal is authentically helping him to achieve it, no matter how much theater is involved.
I myself am willing to steal, certainly die, and probably kill for my children. No matter what lies I would tell or crimes I would commit to keep them safe, I myself, the core of me, would be absolutely authentic in my commitment to my aim, and even though I’m sure I would suffer somewhere along the spectrum of qualms to agony depending on what I’d done, I would feel secure that I had ultimately done right, because the core of me insists that protecting my children (from real and present danger, not slights real or imagined and not manufactured threats) morally trumps pretty much everything else, if only by a little.
Of course, as a non-politician and as a mother, anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that lying, stealing, or killing for mere power could possibly be a correct moral choice.
Apparently a just-published book called “Forcing the Spring” claims that Valerie Jarrett was furious with Joe Biden when he came out in favor of gay marriage before the president had done so publicly.
If you can fake sincerity, blah, blah, blah…but Obama can’t manage to fake it. Nor can his advisers.
Connecting this to the post on sociopathy, when I see Obama with Michelle, I never see warmth in his eyes. Perhaps he doesn’t really understand what marriage is, only what most people seem to think it is. It’s totally unsurprising that he “evolved” on this. It has no connection to him at all.
There is no real Barack Obama. He is a composite of different characters.
TO Obama insiders, his lies were “all about the authenticity….
But was there anyone on either side…who ever thought Obama’s 2008 opposition to gay marriage was authentic in the first place?”
I’m reminded of your old sometime collaborator, drsanity. And the Left’s habitually inverted perceptions, abetted by inverted rationalizations.
These ridiculously admiring praises serve denial auspiciously well for the President of no success.
The trail of events just reinforces the contention of conservative gay men in the Chicago scene that he’s either gay or bisexual.
Axelrod may be too close to the truth with the “authentic” term.
I still think he’s a closet case. Maybe he’ll “come out” after he’s out of our White House. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?
Beverly – I think there is some possibility to your contention also. There some odd pictures floating around of him with men that are quite old and do not appear to be tampered with.
But one thing that always struck me as odd was the “composite girlfriend” in his book. A guy who is so full of charm seems to have left a very light footprint, if you’ll excuse the expression. There do not seem to be any relationships in his life before Michelle, other than a couple of dates that appeared platonic, or for appearances. Whatever creature he is, Something about him has never seemed quite right to me either.
I’m reminded of a comment about the gay marriage issue from Spiked Online. “Public opinion doesn’t change that fast in a free society”. Food for thought, given the recent article at thefederalist.com about Patty Hearst and the brainwashing of America. Jeez I’m mordant today. Sorry.
I don’t understand all this insistence that no ex-girlfriend of Obama’s has ever come forward or been named. There was one who was written about quite extensively a while back.
Surellin: ““Public opinion doesn’t change that fast in a free society”.”
It does if you understand public opinion and culture like activists do, which is to say, as a socially manufactured product of crowd, behavioral economics, general will, collective consciousness, and zeitgeist – as opposed to an aggregation of individual viewpoints formed in individual bubbles of vacuum.
It’s neither magic nor mystery. It’s sociology weaponized as applied method. The Left has acquired dominant control of the social means of production of public opinion. Like upstart competitors that overtake industry pioneers, the key is recognizing the Right can compete with the Left by using the social algorithms constructed by the Left to manipulate the same cues used by the Left to change public opinion “that fast”.
Add: Remember, “free society” only refers to law. The non-government social means of production of public opinion and culture are just as, or more, effective. It’s often noted that the Left uses methods taken from organized religion.
The Left, of course, covers its bases by taking over law and government, too.