Imagine There’s No Marriage

Team Obama is on to something. Worried that fear of a greater evil may not be enough to assure the President’s reelection, they concluded, not without reason, that it was time to throw the base a crumb.  And so it is that Obama voiced a few kind words, only words, about gay marriage.  As predicted, disheartened liberal voters are fired up again.

Obama has yet to give leaders of organized labor even this much.  After remaining aloof from last year’s monumental efforts to resist Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s war on public service unions, he has not yet deigned to campaign for Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic challenger to Walker in next month’s recall election.

Worse still, the Democratic National Committee is loathe even to throw spare change Barrett’s way.  As everyone should know by now, siding with people in struggle is out of bounds for these champions of change and hope.  But one would think that supporting a middle-of-the-road Democrat running against an especially noxious Republican intent on doing the labor movement in would not be asking too much.  Evidently it is, however,  when the corporate paymasters demur.

The old lib-lab coalition used at least to make modest demands on the Democrats they voted into office.  Nowadays, no one asks for anything, and that’s exactly what they get.  That and, at opportune moments, a few spineless words.

Obama’s interview with Robin Roberts –the ABC flack, not the immortal Phillies pitcher – sure did the trick with liberals.  It’s not just the usual cheerleaders and fear mongers, like Rachel Maddow, who think so; even thoughtful critics like Glenn Greenwald agree that the interview was “historic.”

Writing in salon.com, Greenwald was careful to point out that, by saying that marriage is a state, not a federal, issue, Obama all but conceded that he’d do no more than talk the talk.  And he was clear too that this gesture of Obama’s hardly redeems his wretched presidency.  But, he insists, the Roberts interview was a big deal nevertheless.

Perhaps it was; and, if so, it hardly matters, as Greenwald also pointed out, whether Obama spoke from the heart or whether a Joe Biden gaffe (or calculated “indiscretion”) forced his hand.   Neither would it matter that coming out, as it were, for gay marriage now helps with fund raising – at a time when it seems likely that the majority of bankster and vulture capitalist money will go not to Obama, as it did in 2008, but to Mitt Romney, one of their own.

A big deal, maybe; and a historic step, perhaps.  But does it show that Obama is anything like the social radical Fox News makes him out to...