Disgrace - Obama뭩 increasingly absurd gay marriage position

Prism

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Mon Aug-23-10 05:05 PM
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Disgrace - Obama뭩 increasingly absurd gay marriage position

Great article from the New Republic.

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/77154/barack-obama-gay-marriage-disgrace

In the fall of 1912, as his campaign for president entered its final stage, Woodrow Wilson was speaking in Brooklyn when he was asked for his opinion on women뭩 suffrage. The issue was very much in the political ether, but Wilson had declined to take a stand on it. According to John Milton Cooper뭩 excellent biography of the twenty-eighth president, he responded by insisting that it was 뱊ot a question that is dealt with by the national government at all.� The woman who had asked the question was apparently displeased by this blatant dodge. 밒 am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Wilson,� she retorted.

I am speaking to you as an American: It was a wonderful rebuke, one that anticipated the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who would not rail against America but instead demand to be fully part of it. Wilson, however, was unmoved. And his slippery treatment of women뭩 suffrage뾩ike his slippery approach on matters of race뾡id not end once he was in the White House. Running for reelection four years later, he was still playing the same exasperating game. That year, the Democrats did not endorse a constitutional amendment providing for women뭩 suffrage but, instead, called on the states to extend voting rights to women. Such a half-measure looks cowardly in retrospect, of course; but it also looked cowardly at the time. In November 1916, The New Republic excoriated Wilson for his weak stand on the issue. During his reelection campaign, TNR wrote, Wilson had told a group of suffragists that �e was with them,� even as 밾e confessed to a 멿ittle impatience� as to their anxiety about method.� From this, the magazine concluded that the president had 밶t best a vague, benign feeling about , and no conviction whatever that woman suffrage was creating a national situation which called for thorough sincerity, nerve and will.�

An evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will: If these things sound familiar in 2010, it is because Barack Obama is taking exactly the same approach on gay marriage.

. . .

Obama and those around him seem unaware that all of this is a problem; a look at some of the lessons from Wilson뭩 experience might help to clarify why they ought to reconsider. The first lesson is that history does not look kindly on this type of presidential conduct. Wilson is today remembered as a near-great president, but his indifference on questions of gender and race is more than a bit unflattering in retrospect. Second, like Wilson, Obama is running out of time to stay ahead of history. In 1912, women뭩 suffrage was hardly an outlandish cause; one of the three major presidential contenders that year, Teddy Roosevelt, came out in favor of it, even as Wilson remained mum. Similarly, on gay marriage, Obama is now to the right of Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.

President Obama, a Democratic President, is now less liberal on this issue than a majority of Americans.