Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

by Becker, Jo

  But as Chad watched the hosts’ two children, ages four and seven, press flowers and a note into Biden’s hand, he changed his mind. They were sitting in the home of two married men, with their children. The vice president should have to answer to them. When it was Chad’s turn to speak, he decided to make it personal.

  “When you came in tonight, you met Michael and Sonny, and their two beautiful kids that they’re the married parents of. And I wonder if you can just sort of talk in a frank, honest way about your own personal views as it relates to equality, but specifically as it relates to marriage equality.”

  It was clear from Biden’s body language that the question made him uncomfortable. His public position was no different than the president’s. As a senator, he had voted for DOMA. As a presidential candidate, he said he supported civil unions. And as vice president, he had studiously towed the administration’s evolving line, except to note that that there was a growing national consensus that made same-sex marriage inevitable.

  The vice president stood up and flipped his barstool around, so that the back was between him and the rest of the guests, then straddled it. He looked almost pained, Chad would later remark to Lance Black, who was standing next to him.

  “I look at those two beautiful kids—as a matter of fact, your daughter said, ‘Can we go out and play? Can you come outside with me?’ They’re the only good thing in the whole world,” Biden began. “I wish everybody could see this. All you got to do is look in the eyes of those kids. And no one can wonder, no one can wonder whether or not they are cared for and nurtured and loved and reinforced. And folks, what’s happening is, everybody is beginning to see it.

  “Think about how much has changed. And think about what you guys—and one of you in particular—did,” Biden continued, referencing Chad and the case. “Things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to become a political liability in the near term for an individual to say, ‘I oppose gay marriage.’ Mark my words.”

  Having started down this road, he seemed incapable of stopping. People his kids’ age could not understand why gays and lesbians should not be allowed to marry, he said. “‘I mean, what’s the problem, Dad?’

  “And my job—our job—is to keep this momentum rolling to the inevitable.”

  The answer stunned everyone in the room, even top aides who were used to the gaffe-prone vice president’s habit of going off script.

  “He’d been answering that question the same way for years,” said one. “But being in that house, seeing that couple with their kids, the switch flipped. It was like his hard drive got erased.”

  Sitting in his West Wing office more than a year and a half later, the vice president said he could still picture that moment “like it was ten minutes ago.”

  “It was one of the most poignant questions I had ever been asked in my life,” Biden said. “The only other time—it ranks up there when this little girl in Afghanistan was looking at me about two weeks after the Taliban fell, and I was in Kabul, and she looked at me with those beautiful hazel eyes. And she said—I said, ‘Well, I have to leave now,’ and she said, ‘You can’t. You can’t. America can’t leave. I want to be a doctor.’

  “He was standing against the wall behind the couch after I had answered all these questions with the gay leaders from the Los Angeles area, and he just looked at me and, like my mom would say, out of the mouths of babes comes gems of wisdom—it was the most innocent. He said, ‘Well, let me just ask you, Mr. Vice President. What do you think of us?’ And that comes—‘What do you think of us?’ And it was like wow, whoa.”

  Biden thought back to a summer afternoon when he was in his twenties. He was sitting on the beach with his dad and some friends when an older gay couple walked over to say hello. His father, a realtor, had sold them their penthouse apartment. The elder Biden got up, gave them both a hug, and said, “Let me introduce you to my family.” One of his buddies made a derogatory remark about the couple, and his father’s reaction to it had stayed with him always.

  “He says, ‘As soon as they get in the apartment, you go up to the ninth floor. You walk up and knock on the door, and you apologize to them,’” the vice president recalled. When his friend refused, his father said, “Well, goddamn it, you’re not welcome in my house anymore.”

  And he thought about another day, years later, when his own son had looked up at him quizzically after seeing two men headed off to work kiss each other goodbye on a busy street corner. “I said, ‘They love each other, honey,’ and that was it. So it was never anything that was a struggle in my mind.”

  The truth was that, other than being concerned as a Catholic that churches not be forced to perform ceremonies for same-sex couples, “I didn’t see a problem with it,” and never had: “It wasn’t like I had an epiphany, as we Catholics say, one day, ‘Oh my God, I guess there should be gay marriage.’” So when Chad asked the question the way he did, in the privacy of that home in Los Angeles, Biden decided to go ahead and say what he actually thought.

  The encounter was still fresh in the vice president’s mind when David Gregory, the host of the Sunday talk show Meet the Press, asked him during a pretaped interview fifteen days later on Friday, May 4, whether his own views on gay marriage had evolved. Biden talked about the couple he had just met in Los Angeles and, without mentioning Chad’s name, the question he had been asked, and then he gave pretty much the same answer.

  “What this is all about is a simple proposition,” he told Gregory. “Who do you love? Who do you love, and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out is what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they’re marriage is of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”

  “Are you comfortable with same-sex marriage now?” Gregory pressed.

  “I, I—look. I am vice president of the United States. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”

  Only this time, Biden was not speaking at a private event, closed to the press. The interview, which took place on a Friday, was embargoed, but that Sunday it would be broadcast to the nation.

  “I think you may have just gotten in front of the president on gay marriage,” his communications director, Shailagh Murray, told him on the limo ride back from the studio.

  Several months before his vice president spoke his mind, the president had gathered together his senior advisers. With a push by progressives to add marriage equality to the Democratic Party platform, the issue was not going away. If asked again for his position, the president said, he wanted to answer honestly.

  “For as long as I’ve known him, he has never been comfortable with his position on this,” said David Axelrod, one of Obama’s closest and longest-serving aides and a senior campaign strategist for the reelection campaign. “The politics of authenticity, not just the politics, but his own sense of authenticity, required that he finally step forward. And the president understood that.”

  Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage had always stretched credulity, and Pfeiffer’s acrobatics over that old 1996 questionnaire the previous June had caused eye rolling even inside the White House. Since then, it had become increasingly clear to the president and his team that maintaining the “evolving,” “grappling,” “struggling” status quo had a real downside as he headed into the final lap of the presidential election.

  Internal campaign polling showed that same-sex marriage was a touchstone issue for likely Obama voters under the age of thirty, right up there with climate change. The campaign needed those voters to turn out in the record numbers they had four years earlier, a difficult enough task in an economy where many were having difficulty finding jobs, and Obama’s refusal to say he favored allowing gays and lesbians to wed was one of
the biggest impediments.

  But Obama’s aides did not want the president answering a random question off the cuff. If he was going to endorse same-sex marriage before the election, it needed to be done right, at a time of his choosing, using language designed to minimize any political fallout.

  David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president and the manager of his 2008 campaign, reached out to AFER’s Ken Mehlman for some across-the-aisle advice. Mehlman had offered his assistance earlier in the year, when Obama had invited him to lunch after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Obama and Mehlman had attended Harvard Law School together, and over salmon and a salad in the dining room just off the Oval Office, they had talked at length about the politics of same-sex marriage.

  Mehlman strongly believed that the way voters perceive a candidate’s character is more important than where a candidate stands on issues. In 2004, he told Obama, President Bush ran a simple, character-based campaign: You may not agree with me on everything, but you know where I stand. In 2008, Obama had been elected because people viewed him as an idealist who would put politics aside and do what was right. Coming out in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to wed, Mehlman told the president, would remind people why they had elected him by reinforcing those attributes. “The notion that politically this is going to kill you—I don’t buy it,” Mehlman recalled saying.

  He believed that even more deeply now. Mehlman was launching a new venture called Project Right Side, aimed at showing Republicans that supporting same-sex marriage was not just good policy, but good politics. Mehlman had hired George W. Bush’s former pollster and the microtargeting consulting firm he had used in the 2004 reelection to document a tectonic shift in public opinion that threatened to leave the GOP behind. It was not just that young people’s overwhelming support for same-sex marriage made it inevitable. A massive survey of five thousand Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters found that a majority actually supported some form of legal recognition of gay relationships. Those in favor of calling that recognition marriage, while still a minority, felt more strongly about the issue than those opposed. Social issues like gay marriage simply were not a top priority for the vast majority of Repbulicans heading into the 2012 elections, the data showed, and the base was amenable to a conservative case for same-sex marriage that did not require an abandonment of core conservative principles. An impressive 74 percent of those surveyed, for instance, believed government should stay out of people’s private lives, including the lives of gays and lesbians, while 53 percent agreed that “freedom means freedom for everybody, including gays and lesbians, who should have the freedom to enter into relationships with each other.”

  Mehlman’s takeaway: “Republicans are ambivalent about this issue. They may be for marriage amendments but they now have gay friends and relatives and this is difficult for them. And I’ve not talked to a single Republican who doesn’t understand the long-term demographic issue.”

  Simultaneously, Mehlman was working with Chad and the rest of the AFER war room team on tweaking the communication strategy around the case. They had hired Democratic pollster Lisa Grove to help them incorporate the core “dignity, liberty, and freedom” phrases the lawyers had pulled from Justice Kennedy’s opinions into a more multitasking message that would simultaneously appeal to the Supreme Court’s swing voter and Americans still on the fence.

  AFER had done a good job, in Grove’s view, of explaining why the plaintiffs wanted to marry. Gay rights advocates used to talk about benefits like tax write-offs and hospital visitation rights, but her polling showed that voters were far more likely to support same-sex marriage when they understood that gays and lesbians wanted to marry for the same reason straight couples did: to commit to one another.

  But she found the legal arguments AFER was making resonated more with everyday voters when wrapped around a message that framed same-sex marriage as consistent with core American values. Saying that denying gays and lesbians the right to marry “violates their constitutional rights” was not nearly as effective as saying that singling out “one class of citizens because of a trait that is fundamental to who they are is unfair, unlawful, and violates the basic principles of equality that are so important to who we are as a nation.” One principle that Americans took to heart was the golden rule—treating others the way they wanted to be treated themselves. Referencing that, with its Judeo-Christian overtones, helped move people who felt torn between their desire to see people treated equally and their religious beliefs. Messaging built around what Mehlman liked to call “everyday heroes,” like members of the military, was particularly effective, especially when it tapped into voters’ antipathy toward government intrusion: “Are we really going to say to Americans who risk their lives for us that we are going to deny them something as fundamental as the right to marry the person they love?”

  On November 10, 2011, Mehlman sent Plouffe an e-mail that drew upon everything they had learned so far, with detailed talking points for both the president (POTUS) and the first lady (FLOTUS):

  Suggested venue: Should come up as a question in a larger interview with both POTUS and FLOTUS together. Interviewer should be a woman.

  All 3 should be sitting. Soft lighting

  Overall messages:

  1. Our family, like a lot of others, have talked about this and concluded it is wrong for the government to treat some of its citizens differently because of who they love.

  2. We should be encouraging more people to make lifelong commitments to each other, particularly in challenging times like these.

  Possible language:

  I’ve said before that my position has been evolving, and Michelle and I have been having a similar conversation in our family that lots of American families have been having on marriage equality.

  I fully understand that some will agree, while others will disagree, with where our family has come down on this. Thankfully in America we can talk about these complex issues with civility, decency and respect.

  I’ve been a proponent of civil unions. But as Michelle and I have been thinking through what we teach Sasha and Malia about America’s greatness and how we’ve constantly enlarged the circle and expanded freedom, we know [sic] longer feel we can make an exception that treats our gay friends differently just because of who they love.

  I’ve been told that being public about this might hurt me politically.

  But one of the things I’ve really come to appreciate in the past 3 years is that, when you’re President, you’re President of all Americans. And all includes gays and lesbians—men and women who are serving across this country—firefighters, doctors, teachers, courageous soldiers who serve and protect the rest of us.

  Many of them have made life-long commitments to people they love, just like Michelle and I have. And they should be treated the same by their government. Michelle and I believe this doesn’t threaten or change our marriage. It strengthens it.

  We can do this while protecting religious liberty, because what we’re talking about is civil marriage. It’s really important that this doesn’t change how any faith defines marriage in a religious way.

  These tough economic times remind all Americans—regardless of their position on this issue—that we should encourage life-long committed adults to look after each other, allow them to visit each other if they’re in the hospital, care for each other when sick, and after a lifetime of hard work, share the fruits of their labor.

  Happy to discuss

  Ken

  “Thanks for this,” Plouffe immediately e-mailed back.

  One of the cardinal rules of politics is that if an issue has the potential to cause problems for a candidate, it is best to deal with it well before the election so that the dust has time to settle. But weeks, and then months, went by with no presidential announcement.

  “This was so past the sell-by date, yet there was still no real plan in pl
ace,” said one senior administration official. “It just shows you how scared everyone was of this issue.”

  Inside the White House, the first lady and Valerie Jarrett urged the president to go with his gut. The Obamas had a number of gay friends, and though the White House had kept it quiet, the first lady had attended a wedding celebration for her hairdresser when he married his husband. The first lady felt strongly that her husband had the power to help change the conversation on marriage equality. And it was not lost on the president that his failure so far to do that was “a source of disappointment to people who otherwise appreciated him,” Axelrod said.

  This is consistent with who you are, Jarrett told Obama.

  Mehlman and Lisa Grove, the Democratic pollster, continued to pass data along to the White House. By this time, national polls consistently showed that support for same-sex marriage exceeded opposition to it. A clear majority of Democrats favored allowing gays and lesbians to wed, putting the president at odds with his own base. Forty-eight companies, including Nike, Time Warner Cable, Aetna, and Xerox, had signed on to a legal brief arguing that DOMA negatively affected their businesses, and much of corporate America, from the CEO of Starbucks to the chairman of Goldman Sachs, had come down on the side of marriage equality.

  In addition to all the Republican megadonors Mehlman had brought to the cause, the list of Republicans publicly supporting same-sex marriage now included former first lady Laura Bush, Steve Schmidt, who helped run Senator John McCain’s race against Obama in 2008, McCain’s wife and daughter, and Grover Norquist, an influential conservative activist best known for his ability to browbeat GOP candidates across the country into signing his no-new-taxes pledge, to name a few. Billionaire industrialist David Koch, whose bankrolling of conservative causes had made him one of the most influential men in the Republican Party, had privately told Olson that he too supported same-sex marriage, a position he would soon make public. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, former president Clinton had publicly said that he had been “wrong” to oppose same-sex marriage. Clinton had then pushed for passage of the New York law legalizing it, saying that allowing gays and lesbians to wed was part of the nation’s permanent mission “to form a more perfect union.”