| | Ed, that was excellent!
I recognize that Obama's announcement helped to fire up his base, and that it generated a lot more campaign donations, but I don't think those were the primary reasons. I don't think his announcement was to gain the money or because he calculated that it would generate more votes. I believe that Obama's campaign leaders have decided that a win will require attacking Romney on many fronts, but that the main theme of all the attacks will be that he is a far right extremist, a religious weirdo, and not a safe change. They will orchestrate rumors that can't be traced to campaign staff about the strange practices of Mormons, talk about destruction of the safety net, about taking away social security and medicare, and, most of all, they will dangle bait (anything that will make conservative social issues like gay marriage the topic of the week).
This I think is why he decided to put forth what I'm sure he has believed all along. He threw gay marriage under the bus for his 2008 run but I doubt that doing so was anything but a political lie - just like throwing Reverend Wright under the bus, or firing Van Jones.
The suspicious side of me wonders about the coincidence of the 5,400 word, front-page Washington Post article that was published (the one accusing the young Mitt Romney of assaulting a gay boy in high school) the same week that Obama goes public with his 'evolved' views - and the chorus of sycophants that speak adoringly of him being the first president brave enough to take this view.
Now, Obama gets to go back to what he has believed all along, but doing so while hoping to make all the undecideds see the Republicans as neanderthal, social conservatives. The extra campaign funds, and the fired up base are just icing on the cake. What he has to do is paint Romney in a way that makes him unelectable (like was done to Goldwater) and use up the bandwidth that would otherwise be occupied discussing his destructive record on the economy, on health care, etc.
There has to be a central theme, and the rest can be denials, lies, and spin. I think the theme will be that the Romney will wage war on gays, take us back to the policies that hurt us in the past, take away all the entitlements, favor the rich, hurt the rest of us, etc. The most clever of the attacks will be in the form of baited traps.
[p.s., another way you can tell Obama wasn't being honest is that he didn't talk about gay marriage as an inalienable right, but rather that he was just discussing the 'evolution' of his personal opinion and implied that states had the right to vote on it. That hedge was probably poll-tested language to keep him scaring away independents or the larger portion of the black and the Hispanic community who are uncomfortable with gay marriage. All political dance steps to distract the public and bait the republicans. he's an election troll.]
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