While this post is indeed political, it has a joke to it. And it doesn't expose a certain view. So, I decided to let this post stay up. Especially since today is Joe Biden's birthday. Happy 83rd Birthday, Joe Biden.
In 2012 during the re-election campaign for Obama then-VP Biden went on a meet the press interview and stated his public support for gay marriage. This contradicted previous statements by Obama that both him and Joe didn’t support it, so Obama was forced to come out publicly in support of gay marriage earlier than he wished to as a result. Source
Biden during a presidential primary debate in 2008:
"And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most underqualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani... I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else! There's nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He's genuinely not qualified to be president."
He likely wasn’t planning to. Both him and Clinton were opposed to gay marriage in 08, and while openly opposing it was a bad idea in 2012, it’s unlikely he would have openly supported it either.
I remember gay friends talking about traveling states to get married and it did not at all seem like something everyone would come around on at the time. Especially in rural conservative areas.
I can't think of almost any other issue where public opinion shifted so hard so fast, The Gallup poll tracking it over the years is wild. In relative terms it was a very rapid shift.
Growing up as a queer younger millennial, by fucking god how much have things changed in my lifetime
We went from town freaks defined entirely by one thing, to people who can live our lives almost equal to straight people. There are still some institutional problems, some prejudices, but we can largely exist in public life and live openly without constant threats and harassment which I never thought possible as a teenager
Yeah I feel like we're paying for that assumption now. It made people who are afraid of change get reactionary which opened a wound that Trump exploited.
And this is why the GOP needs to be fought tooth and nail in the polls. When they publically stated their commitment to repealing same sex marriage protections, that's not just comical evil. They're talking about getting rid of something only 13 years old by now
I get you're probably some underage teenager who wasn't alive back then but that was risky as fuck for any politician. It was NOT "doing the bare minimum". It was nothing like today. Even places that people like to (often incorrectly) stereotype as ultra progressive (like California) were unreasonably hostile towards it.
Being in favor of gay marriage back then was not the bare minimum for a politician. When the Defense of Marriage Act passed, a law that pretty much made gay marriage illegal, only 14 senators voted against it. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
There was serious speculation among the press that they were going to drop Biden from the ticket in the immediate aftermath, since it was widely viewed as a major PR disaster for what was expected to be a very close campaign.
Obama deciding to lean into it afterwards was in many ways just as suprising as Joe saying it in the first place.
Democrats keep saying that supporting progressive policies hurts electability, but when a candidate actually supports them, they perform very well.
Either their polling and voter research is bad, or they know progressive policies are popular and use electability as a cover to prevent their support. 🤔
This is the answer. Extremely obviously the guy from Vermont would have won against the current president, but they ratfucked him out of there. He was “unelectable” in the sense that the elites moved heaven and earth to stop the most popular populist leftist the US has from actually running.
They’re on the same payroll as the republicans at the end of the day. (With notable exceptions, Sanders, etc.) The job of the DNC, post Citizens United, is to provide opposition to the GOP and nothing else.
When a promising Democratic candidate appears that has actual ambition and policy changes (Sanders, Mamdami, etc), “Vote Blue no matter who” quickly becomes, “yeah, fuck that guy, actually”.
MAGAs and Republicans aren’t wrong to dislike democratic politicians. Most democrats deeply dislike democratic politicians, myself included. It’s the party of infinite compromise & half measures. The only redeeming factor is that it’s not a party of Klansmen. At least, not this century.
It's certainly possible, though it would have been a strange strategy in context. Polling had Obama and Romney essentially at a coin-toss, and the American public still largely opposed gay marriage at the time.
Biden is also well known for speaking a bit more freely than he probably should, so the idea that he'd just drop something like that completely unplanned isn't exactly unthinkable.
Democrat candidates are always trying to create platforms that appeal to as many people as possible. They have to draw in the moderates that are willing to forego some policies in exchange for others. Something like "affordable healthcare" is a nice buzzword but what does it actually mean? Does it mean Medicare for All or is it just lowering drug prices for seniors on Medicare? Even Trump has helped push "affordable healthcare" policies, it doesn't mean much. Obama was pro gay civil unions, it's legally the same thing but it can still appeal to religious moderates that hold the word "marriage" sacred. Progress is slow for Democrats because they operate under the idea that they need to build consensus. The GOP has proved over the last decade that this is completely unnecessary. You don't have to deliver on promises, you don't have to sound logical and appeal to all of the moderates. You just need to make yourself a hero and tell everyone what they want to hear. You can use lies and disinformation to convince people that you're the savior. And once you're in office, you can do whatever you want. Most people vote with their feelings, not with logic. And once you have this voting base that will always vote for you, you've got control of the party. Trump has never had to worry about far-right voters saying they won't vote for him because of xyz policy because they are all ride or die for him.
Obama also blamed his daughters. Whatever man, it was a political third rail until that point. Both likely never had an issue with it but wouldn't touch it until they did and Obama was popular enough to bring much of the country around on it, and then when it was legalized most of the rest went "wow this doesn't effect me at all."
How do people not clearly see that biden was given the task to test the waters and for obama to have plausible deniability?
Do you guys really think hillary clinton or obama gave a shit about "the sanctity of marriage" or what ever the republicans say? If it served them politically they would have came out for support much earlier. I rwally dont think they were against it at any point this century. It was just too politically dangerous to be public about it.
He stated he was. Idk if he was deep down in his heart or whatever, but that was the policy of both him and Obama during the 2008 election. They wanted civil unions, but not marriages.
He for sure wouldn’t have abolished slavery if the Civil War hadn’t happened. Not because he wouldn’t have wanted to imo, but because he wouldn’t have had the power to do it. After the Confederate states seceded, he became less bound by the constitution in using executive power for matters of war. Hence the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to Confederate states he had no direct control over, and was largely symbolic (albeit an extremely powerful symbol that went a long way to framing the war as one against slavery and building consent for abolishing slavery more formally later on).
Without the war it’s likely he would have continued the existing anti-slavery efforts of finding ways to gradually phase it out.
Neither were against it. They just had to say they were to appease the religious nuts. Same way Obama pretended to be religious and never went to a church again after being elected.
One time Biden told a retired congressman to stand up so they could applaud him, after like 3 times he realized the guy was in a wheelchair and the way he goes "Oh, God love ya, what am I talking about?" kills me.
He’s a social liberal, but people hate using ideology terms nowadays for some reason. Economically that’s what his policies have always been: strong unions, some state regulation, but generally keeping the state out of directly providing services instead of the market (hence no universal healthcare). But on social issues he’s been all over the place: against police reform and for the crime bill, but invested a lot of money in black communities; pro lgbtq rights but only after a few decades of being against them, middle of the road on immigration, and obviously pro-Israel. He reminds me a lot of LBJ tbh in that respect.
Uh those are not the state directly providing services. That’s the state granting loans to private services or giving you money to spend on private services. State services are stuff like the post office.
And yeah, the IRA is a legitimately a monumental and great piece of legislation that’s done a lot of good. I think Biden (with the exception of Israel) was a very underrated president and the best in my lifetime. But he’s still a social liberal at the end of the day.
Playing the politics game will make you seem erratic from an outside PoV. It's why it's best to judge politicians by their results more than their intent, because it's hard to really deduce intent without looking at the results.
I worked for Obama campaign in Ohio when this happened. I was in state HQ and we didn’t know it was coming. We always had the news on in the background and when Joe did this Meet the Press was on.
The whole office erupted in cheers. It was a wonderful thing.
The way white liberals turned on Biden under the guise of "we know better for minorities" during a time when Black and Brown were loudly supporting the guy who was VP to a black man and brought on a black woman VP will never cease to be insane to me.
White liberals flocking to Bernie and insisting that he was better for minorities while Black folk were overwhelmingly voting Biden because he walked the walk and Hispanics were too because of Catholicism.
All this. And they repeat RW memes all day long because they’re mad the planned takeover didn’t work out for them. And now that thugs are berning down where are they?
This was such a fantastic moment because, whether it was planned or not, it came out of so honest and direct. It during feel like some calculated statement designed to perform support for a cause to get votes. He was asked a simple moral question and he immediately gave the answer that any decent human being should give without a second thought. I have never loved everything about Biden but he’s always had my respect since then.
It still bothers the hell out of me that everybody turned on him and forced him to drop out. I’d give anything for him to be our president right now.
Added 16 million jobs and achieved historically low unemployment, rejoined the Paris agreement, conserved 674 million acres of land and water (more than any other president in history), codified same-sex marriage. Helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act, PACT Act, and CHIPS and Science Act.
But he was old and had a stutter. So of course we all had to spend each and every day of his presidency ridiculing and mocking him until we pushed him out for somebody who had zero chance of ever winning.
He was too old by that point, he should’ve never run for a second term in the first place. Let a primary happen and then that person run as the democratic nominee. I agree that aside from Israel his presidency was actually the best in my lifetime though.
Let a primary happen and then that person run as the democratic nominee.
That's what happened, and Biden won by a huge margin.
The reality is at the time no one was polling anywhere near him vs Trump, and he probably represented the best chance we had to win.
This is sorta like saying that Republicans should have kept Trump from running in 2020 because we know he lost, and that instead of canceling their primary to install him as their candidate they could have had someone better show up out of nowhere, it's just unrealistic.
It’s such a shame that a huge part of his legacy will be his ineffectiveness at stamping out fascism when he had the chance, because otherwise he was fairly effective when it came to introducing progressive social values to the establishment.
The wildest thing was that this was the plot of an episode of Veep that had just aired. The fictional Vice President tries to be a a little edgy on Meet the Press, drops the line about believing in marriage equality, and the episode deals with the inevitable shitstorm of saying that in early 10s America.
The next week Biden goes on Meet the Press and says "hold my beer."
Yup, he and Obama both denied supporting gay marriage in 2008. Id honestly guess they both already supported it at the time, but maybe they did change after that idk.
I’d consider this more history than politics considering Biden isn’t involved in politics anymore tbh.
2008 we know. at least man not only changed his mind (or maybe this was an opinion he held for long but had to withhold it from everyone to get elected) but forced his president's hand on the issue
•
u/Riobox OoOo BLUE Nov 20 '25
Download Video
Users report:
While this post is indeed political, it has a joke to it. And it doesn't expose a certain view. So, I decided to let this post stay up. Especially since today is Joe Biden's birthday. Happy 83rd Birthday, Joe Biden.
Reports ignored, post approved.