David Marcus: What Obama's biggest lie can teach us about suddenly centrist Kamala Harris
In 2008, when Barack Obama was running for president, he flat out lied about opposing gay marriage based on his deep Christian beliefs. We know this because in a book published in 2015, former senior adviser to the president David Axelrod described Obama, after such a speech, complaining to him, "I’m just not very good at bulls---ing."
It turns out he actually was pretty good at it. Today the American people have to ask themselves how good Vice President Kamala Harris is at B.S. as she seeks to transform herself from a San Francisco progressive into a blue-dog centrist Democrat.
Now, Obama had an advantage here. It was mostly only the gay marriage issue where his pretend conservatism seemed completely out of whack with his history as a progressive community organizer. Harris is seeking to reverse half a dozen positions.
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If you have been following them as they go by, Kamala has flip-flopped on building a wall, fracking, Medicare-for-all, reimagining the police, and banning gas-powered vehicles. So far, from what we know, she has not officially registered as a Republican.
Voters, especially Republicans and independents, are naturally a bit suspicious about whether Harris really believes any of these things after a decades-long political career of opposing them, and this is where the great lie of Barack Obama can tell us a lot, not just about Harris, but about Democratic voters.
The funny thing about Obama’s weird stance against gay marriage, on which he suddenly evolved in office, is that nobody, especially Democrats, really believed it. I will never forget conversation after conversation with loyal Obama acolytes in which they said, "he doesn’t really think that, he just has to say it to get elected"
If the past is prologue, it is very likely that many, maybe even most Democratic voters don’t believe Harris has changed all these positions, but they are OK with it so long as she wins and reverts to her progressive self.
It reminds me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, in which a pair of lovers with an age gap aren’t quite honest with each other about it, but make it work, the final couplet singing:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
Put another way, as long as they are in on the prevarication, Democrats will let a few, or in this case, a whole lot of whoppers fly.
And sure enough, when Axelrod penned his memoir he spilled the beans. Of course, Obama never opposed gay marriage, but in the primary he needed to dominate the Black vote, which was resistant to the movement, and in the general he needed religious independents.
One would think that this kind of abject lying to the American people is something one would never speak of again once it worked, but instead, Axelrod brags about it, and hey, it worked, right?
Now think about just how many former Obama aides and officials are crawling around the inner circle of the Harris campaign. It sure looks like they are returning to this duplicitous, say anything playbook to get the new gal over the finish line.
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It may be that the friendly news media will also give Harris’ merry-go-round of policy positions an uncritical pass as base Democratic voters smile inside, knowing they are also in on the game, but independents and undecideds may not be so unflinchingly credulous.
The question they are asking is not so much why Harris has done this parade of about-faces -- after all, once you lie about a position it is easy to manifest some fake explanation for it -- their reasonable question is, "does she really mean it?"
History tells us that she does not, it tells us that just like Barack Obama before her, she will take any position, no matter how absurdly it conflicts with everything she has ever said, for just a few more votes.
Obama and the Democrats never paid a price for his lie about gay marriage, they even laugh about it. But perhaps the bill has now come due, perhaps the voters remember, and perhaps they will not simply accept this time that Kamala Harris pinky swears that all of her politics have changed in 40 days.
If so, it is a comeuppance sincerely deserved, if somewhat delayed.