Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Pride and courage

_{Visual source: Newseum}

Courage is articulating your personal convictions and evolution in a split country. Pride is what many of us feel today. Cowardice is the other guy, who can't stand up to his own followers. A sampling follows:

Frank Bruni:

Hooray for President Obama, who indeed risked something today. You will hear in the coming hours and for the rest of the week that because of Joe Biden's bit of Sunday-morning loquaciousness, Obama more or less had to do this, lest he diminish his 'brand' of high principle and authenticity, lest he lose moneyed gay donors, lest he look like a troglodyte in an administration of more enlightened sorts.

And perhaps he and his aides did conclude that politically, this was the optimal course, the better wager.

But there's plenty of doubt and plenty of dispute about that. Plenty.

Nate Silver:

President Obama's decision to endorse same-sex marriage undoubtedly entails some political risk, but recent polls suggest that public opinion is increasingly on his side.

According to surveys included in the PollingReport.com database, an average of 50 percent of American adults support same-sex marriage rights while 45 percent oppose it, based on an average of nine surveys conducted in the past year.

This is a reversal from earlier periods: support for same-sex marriage has been increasing, and opposition to it has been decreasing, at a relatively steady rate of perhaps two or three percentage points a year since 2004.

David Frum:

The president's statement today about marriage rights changes nothing'and everything.

The statement changes everything because it powerfully symbolizes an awakening that so many people have had, myself included: here is a social change whose time has come, and more than come. Denying marriage rights to same-sex couples inflicts real harm on real people, while doing nothing to prevent the deterioration of marriage among non-affluent Americans.

The statement changes everything because it puts marriage rights on the 2012 ballot as a voting issue. Mitt Romney has declared'not only his opposition to same-sex marriage'but his intention to use the power of the presidency to stop and reverse it. One may doubt how intensely Romney feels about that commitment, really. My own guess: about 1/1000 as intensely as he feels about Sarbanes-Oxley. But the issue is joined even so.

Frank Rich:

And so, Obama has finally finished evolving on same-sex marriage.

And about time! I, for one, never understood the point of saying you were 'evolving' when many of the voters you were pandering to don't even believe in evolution.

Mike Bloomberg:

"This is a major turning point in the history of American civil rights. No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people ' and I have no doubt that this will be no exception. The march of freedom that has sustained our country since the Revolution of 1776 continues, and no matter what setbacks may occur in a given state, freedom will triumph over fear and equality will prevail over exclusion. Today's announcement is a testament to the President's convictions, and it builds on the courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village."

BuzzFeed:

After three years of political compromise on issues from health care reform to spending cuts, Obama delivered a surprise gift to what many of his core supporters view as the civil rights issue of the day, simply by saying what everyone assumed he believed. But the distinction between implying a change and saying it outright will more than symbolic in the crucial area of campaign fundraising. Already, gay donors, mostly men, reportedly constitute 1 in 6 of Obama's top fundraisers known as bundlers. And in the first 90 minutes after the news broke Wednesday, the campaign received $1 million in spontaneous contributions, a Democrat told BuzzFeed.

'This is beyond unifying ' it's electrifying,' said Eugene Sepulveda, a former top bundler who withdrew to take a non-political job early this year. 'This man stands for right, despite the political consequences.'

Mark Blumenthal:

In a recent New York Times column, Pew Research president Andrew Kohut noted that while "much of the growing support for gay marriage is generational," it also reflects changing opinion among older Americans. "Since 2004," Kohut writes, "support for gay marriage has increased from 30 percent to 40 percent among baby boomers, and even among seniors (from 18 percent to 32 percent)."

Jonathan Rauch:

What happened? Harry Truman was fond of quoting Mark Twain: "When in doubt, do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." Now and then, politicians have a "goddammit" moment. Obama's position had clearly shifted on the issue (who was he kidding with his talk of having "evolved" but being unwilling to make news?), and there was never going to be a better time to make the switch than now--at least not while he is certain to be a non-lame-duck president.

So Obama decided it's worth a roll of the dice to make history. Which is what he has done.

As of his announcement, favoring gay marriage is now fully, indisputably, and permanently a mainstream political position. All hint of weirdness or stigma is gone. It is also now the stated position of one of the two major political parties (only 16 years after President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed the anti-gay-marriage Defense of Marriage Act). Precisely because the issue is unlikely to decide the election this year, November's result will not revoke the issue's promotion in status even if Obama loses. Though gay couples have not achieved full legal equality, gay marriage, as an issue, has achieved full political equality. That is a landmark in the ongoing marriage debate.

So goes conventional wisdom, but here's betting Rauch (see his post) is wrong and the upside in the end outweighs the downside. However, Obama can't know that, so count this as courage.

Jonathan Cowan (Third Way):

Our four years of research on the middle and marriage taught us this ' if Americans in the middle believe that gay and lesbian couples want to marry to make a promise of lifetime commitment and fidelity, not to gain rights and benefits, they'll accept it. The president's statement was pitch perfect when it focused on allowing committed gay couples to make the public promise that marriage entails. If marriage supporters stay on that message, the middle can be won.