In his new memoir “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod admits that the president supported gay marriage privately back in 2008 but concealed his position for political expediency.
This is a fact that many progressives have long suspected, but no one in Obama’s inner circle has ever admitted it publicly — until now. Axelrod, who served as Obama’s chief campaign adviser during the 2008 race and later as a senior adviser at the White House, has provided a rare glimpse into the inner-workings of an infamously secretive campaign machine.
“I’m just not very good at bullsh-tting,” Obama told Axelrod according to the book, and yet throughout his first victorious presidential campaign the then-Illinois senator stuck by a position of support for civil unions but not full marriage rights. In his book, Axelrod concedes that he personally put pressure on Obama to compromise his own personal beliefs in favor of marriage equality.
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“Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’ ” Axelrod writes in “Believer.”
“Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position,” Axelrod adds. “He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews.”
During the 2008 campaign, many conservatives highlighted Obama’s answer to a 1996 questionnaire while he was in the Illinois state senate as a more authentic window into his views on gay marriage. “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” Obama wrote. Yet as a candidate for president, Obama routinely cited his Christian faith as the main impetus for his opposition to marriage equality.









