Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (38 page)

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 place,” 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.”

But Obama’s campaign team remained wary. They feared that embracing same-sex marriage could splinter the coalition he needed to win a second term, depressing turnout among socially conservative African American and Latino voters and working-class Catholic whites. North Carolina, a battleground state Obama had won in 2008, appeared poised to pass a constitutional amendment banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions by wide margins in a special election in May.

“We understood that this would be galvanizing to some voters and be difficult with other voters,” Jim Messina, who had left the White House to manage Obama’s 2012 campaign, recalled. “My thing was, let’s do it in a way that makes sense.”

Mehlman talked to Plouffe again when he ran into him in April 2012 at OutGiving, the annual gathering of gay donors where Black had tested the waters for AFER three years earlier. In addition to the May special election in North Carolina, same-sex marriage was on the ballot in four states in November: Lawmakers in Washington and Maryland had voted to allow gays and lesbians to wed, twin legislative victories that voters were now being asked to ratify, voters in Maine would decide whether to reverse the ban there, and voters in Minnesota, where same-sex marriage was already prohibited by statute, would be asked whether to write a Prop 8–like ban into their constitution. Mehlman was working with groups in all four states to build Republican support, but he told Plouffe he worried that the president’s silence would be used against them.

“
Good point,” he said Plouffe told him. “We need to deal with this.”

And that was where things stood when Biden, Chad’s question still ringing in his ears, gave the answer he did on
Meet the Press
on May 4, sending everyone into panic mode and forcing the president’s hand.

In the immediate aftermath, media commentators would speculate that Biden’s comments either constituted a trial balloon or were cleared by the
White House as a way to mollify the gay community without the president having to take a position. They were not privy to the chaos that erupted inside the West Wing after an e-mailed transcript of the interview landed in the in-box of the White House press team.

Jarrett, who had been hoping and pressing for a big presidential moment, was so furious she accused Biden through an intermediary of downright disloyalty. The president was often accused of “leading from behind,” and this would play into that meme. Biden had launched his 2016 campaign—at the president’s expense, other aides bitterly complained. Campaign officials were also agitated. As one White House official with direct knowledge put it, “They felt they already were vulnerable, and they had not fully resolved yet what they wanted to do.”

The White House’s early attempts at spin reflected that lack of resolution. Biden, in the interview from his West Wing office eighteen months later, said he fully meant to endorse marriage equality. As vice president, “I didn’t go out volunteering a position, but when asked a question, I had to say, because I think it’s the ultimate civil right of our day. I had to respond to it,” he said.

But his comments were just elliptical enough that the White House’s first response was to try to walk them back. “What VP said—that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights—is precisely POTUS’s position,” Axelrod tweeted on Sunday, May 6, the day Biden’s interview aired. The vice president’s office was told to put out a “clarification” echoing that sentiment: “The Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue,” it said.