On Monday night’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, Republican strategist Karl Rove explained why President Barack Obama’s new position on gay marriage isn’t all that it seems, particularly because of who is applauding it.
Rove said Obama’s shift was a flip-flop and suggested it was one of convenience, at least in terms of fundraising.
“The president has done himself some damage on the gay marriage issue, in part because he flip-flopped on it,” Rove said. “But also because of the way that he did it. Remember we’ve been told New York magazine had an article, and [Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist] Andrew Sullivan’s laudatory piece — he says, ‘Look they made this decision because it would help them financially. The gay bundlers told them they were sitting on their wallets, and second it would help them with young millennials.'”
Rove then elaborated on a New York magazine article that said Obama had decided to support same-sex marriage after New York State legalized the practice last June, but that he decided to waited to announce until closer to election day.
“What kind of profile encourages that?” Rove said. “You change your mind and you say I’m going to sit on this for 14 or 15 months until I can max just before the Democratic convention? I mean — transactional.”
But Rove was more critical of Sullivan, particularly for his Newsweek cover story declaring Obama “the first gay president,” and reminded “Hannity” viewers of Sullivan’s so-called “Trig trutherism.”
“It was not her child,” he said sarcastically. “It was Bristol’s child, not Sarah Palin’s — shameless. And read the article … Andrew is known as a fervent proponent of gay marriage, and he lets the proponent in him overwhelm his background as a journalist. But even he puts in there, ‘Well, the reason the president did this is to get votes among millennials — young voters and because the gay bundlers told that after he refused to get rid of that policy and that policy, they were sitting on their checkbooks.”