Vice President Biden’s Gay-Marriage Gaffe Is Mess for White House
If Vice President Biden continues to make public appearances during this campaign, White House press secretary Jay Carney should be offered a membership in the janitors’ union.
As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies necessary to clean up the mess Biden made in his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage — a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of his boss, President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden’s views but who says that his own thinking is “evolving.”
The vice president said he is “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, committing the classic Washington gaffe of accidentally speaking the truth. This bit of straight talk made Obama’s position — neither for nor against such unions but in an evolutionary state, not unlike the Galapagos finch — all the more untenable. On Monday, Biden took off for a campaign event in Tennessee, leaving Carney on cleanup duty. But the more Carney swabbed the mess, the more it spread.
CNN’s Jessica Yellin asked whether Obama was trying to “have it both ways before an election” and whether he should “stop dancing around the issue.”