Jake Tapper Compares President Obama With Miss California

Man, I am rolling my eyes here, because nobody is going to be happy with me on this one.

Unless you live in a cave, without cable, you know about the brouhaha surrounding Miss California Carrie Prejean. Unfairly excoriated for voicing an unfairly solicited opinion at the Miss USA pageant, she went on to join the anti-gay marriage group NOM. In doing so, she went from being a person who disagreed with gay marriage but viewed it as a choice that people should be free to make, to someone who seeks to deny the rights of others to marry.

In the ensuing melee, Miss California's initial position has been compared with that of President Obama. Fair enough, although she wasn't really staking out a political position at that point. Both President Obama and Carrie Prejean profess a belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

However, Carrie Prejean then joined the anti-gay marriage group NOM, making her a political opponent of gay marriage. President Obama, meanwhile, has opposed gay marriage bans, and favors a repeal of DOMA. That's some significant daylight between the two. That's not, apparently, how Jake Tapper sees it:

White House Spokeswoman Carrie Prejean?

...Writing at the Christian Science Monitor, former Bush White House spox Jimmy Orr wrote that if "Gibbs was wearing a swimsuit or a sparkly gown, you could say he looked like Miss California. As you recall, Carrie Prejean said she didn't support gay marriage. And she said, albeit not as articulately as Gibbs, that it's a states rights issue."

Orr notes that US News & World Report's Robert Schlesinger recalls being asked at a same sex marriage "why Carrie Prejean, Miss California, gets lambasted for being anti-gay marriage, while Barack Obama, the president of the United States, gets a free pass while having essentially the same position. The answer lies in tone and nuance."

While the President's position on gay marriage isn't exactly where it needs to be, it is not "essentially the same" as Carrie Prejean's, a fact that Tapper fails to point out. While I expect conservative bloggers to make hay with this, Tapper should have refuted that statement, even if crankily.

The result is a piece that gives the impression that Barack Obama favors banning gay marriage, which is not true. Unlike Think Progress, I ascribe no sinister motive. Jake just gets cranky when you evade his questions.

What is true is that Barack Obama's position on gay marriage was built for a 2008 world. Until recently, it looked like civil unions would be the ground on which gay marriage would be fought, and a lot of Democrats staked it out, even Hillary Clinton. That has changed, and gay marriage dominoes are falling.

I think that Barack Obama sees the political cost of changing his position as greater than the benefit, since gay marriage seems inevitable now. While that's probably true, the cost will come as Republicans run on the issue in 2010, and use his position for cover.

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