Biden blamed; politics drove timing

Politico ^

[Sub-Driver]

Biden blamed; politics drove timing By: Glenn Thrush and Carrie Budoff Brown May 9, 2012 09:12 PM EDT

Joe Biden just might go down in history as the guy who forced Barack Obama to publicly announce his private support for gay marriage.

But the vice president is no hero in the West Wing, and administration officials are struggling to cast Obama’s truly historic — and risky — announcement as something more than an election-year shotgun wedding.

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.

[r-q-tek86]

I call BS. This was another “manufactured” crisis by the left.

You are exactly right. zero is trying to change the subject from his disastrous record on the economy to social issues. We need to ignore this and turn every conversation back to economic issues. zero is weak there and he knows it.

[hoosiermama]

Ya know, Leni, it just the thing that might turn part of the 90% black democratic and Hispanic vote around. We will now see if Race trumps Religion or if Faith is strong enough and actions really matters in their communities.

IMO Now would be a good time for Conservative American Christians with Extra Pigment CACEP to release information on the history of the Democrats and Civil Rights.

[Still Thinking]

Everybody on the left is celebrating like this is an astute political move by The Won. I guess it remains to be seen, but I suspect they’re on crack or whistling past the graveyard. I think he shot himself, if not in the foot, maybe a little higher up and closer to the centerline, electorally.