The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Look Out Below!
“Tesla Sedan to Hit Showrooms in June, Earlier Than Planned”–headline, MSNBC.com, May 9

Why Obama Flipped
Last night brought an email from Barack Obama with the subject line “Marriage.” It began: “James–Today, I was asked a direct question and gave a direct answer.” What drove Obama to do something so wildly out of character?

Money, for one thing. The Washington Post reported the other day that “about one in six of Obama’s top campaign ‘bundlers’ are gay . . . making it difficult for the president to defer the matter.” Lefty Post blogger Greg Sargent added:

Some leading gay and progressive donors are so angry over President Obama’s refusal to sign an executive order barring same sex discrimination by federal contractors that they are refusing to give any more money to the pro-Obama super PAC, a top gay fundraiser’s office tells me. In some cases, I’m told, big donations are being withheld.

BuzzFeed.com adds that “many in Hollywood” have “been privately sharing” the view that “the Obama presidency has been a flop. . . . But, as if on cue, Obama may have changed the narrative Wednesday in one bold move–the kind of transformative act those in Hollywood have been waiting for.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with a politician listening to his financial supporters. Though don’t hold your breath waiting for the New York Times to denounce this as an example of the corrupting influence of political money.

One shouldn’t discount sheer moral vanity as a motivator either. Yahoo! News’s Walter Shapiro speculates that “in moral terms, it is quite possible that Obama could not personally endure further equivocation.” Late last night Obama (via his campaign account, @BarackObama) tweeted a photo of himself looking skyward, with a quote from himself: ” ‘Same-sex couples should be able to get married.’–President Obama.” The text of the tweet read simply: “History.”

It is possible that Obama’s self-love amplifies the workings of the Taranto principle by making him and his advisers especially sensitive to elite liberal opinion. “In the end, people close to the president say, it wasn’t a close call,” Politico reports:

The core of their argument against Mitt Romney is that he is an untrustworthy politician with no real core of conviction. Obama’s advisers–who are acutely conscious of the media’s criticism despite their professed contempt for the news cycle–simply couldn’t afford to have the president appear like a coward on the front and editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, according to senior Democrats.

You have to love both the cynicism and the self-contradiction of carefully calibrating a major change in position in order to serve the purpose of making the other guy look like a flip-flopper. But the bit about the Times and the Post rings 100% true, doesn’t it?

What does it mean for November? The president himself, in his “Good Morning America” interview, feigned nonchalance. “It’d be hard to argue that somehow this is–something that I’d be doin’ for political advantage–because frankly, you know–you know, the politics, it’s not clear how they cut.” Frankly!

Many of Obama’s supporters in the media agree with him on the substance and are simply delighted that he has finally made public that he agrees with them. Their enthusiasm provides support for Jeff Bell’s assertion that social issues constitute the left’s “irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle.”

But this ideological fervor renders suspect their evaluations of the likely political consequences, which are remarkably blasé. “A Historic Moment, but One With Little Electoral Effect” is the headline on a Washington Post post by Jonathan Bernstein:

For those who strongly support Obama’s new position, it’s unlikely that this changes anything. Yes, some marriage-equality advocates had talked about withholding support unless the president “evolved.” But realistically, there was no way that political activists–people accustomed to the normal give-and-take of politics–were not going to appreciate the wide gulf between Obama and Mitt Romney on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Without this statement they might have needed more careful tending, but they weren’t going to walk away from their best ever ally in the White House.

The same is true for strong opponents of Obama’s new position. It’s highly unlikely that anyone who, otherwise was fine voting for Obama despite disagreeing with him on ending “don’t ask don’t tell” and each of the other measures he has supported and in many cases has enacted, would draw the line here. Nor is it likely that anyone not already energized by Obama’s record on cultural issues will suddenly find this to be the thing that gets them off the couch.

And what of everyone else? The millions of Americans, most likely a large majority, who don’t really care very much? They’re still not going to care very much. My guess is that the conventional wisdom is correct: Anyone pushing hard on the marriage issue in either direction risks seeming out of touch with those who care a lot more about the economy or other issues.

We tend to agree with that last “guess,” but how could Bernstein fail to realize that Obama’s high-profile preening about his making “history” constitutes the kind of “pushing hard” that is politically risky?

And while it’s no doubt true that Mitt Rommey runs a risk if he sounds harsh or obsessive in his opposition to same-sex marriage, it remains the case that he is on the side of public opinion. Victory has a thousand fathers, as John F. Kennedy observed, but defeat has two mommies. Every state that has cast a ballot on the question has voted against same-sex marriage, including three socially liberal ones (California, Maine and Oregon). North Carolina, which Obama carried in 2008, did so just this week by a vote of 61% to 39%.

To be sure, same-sex marriage is less unpopular than it used to be. Legislatures in several states have enacted it without being ordered to do so by the courts, and by now there probably are a few states in which it would be approved in a plebiscite. Not among them, however, are any of what are generally considered the swing states in this year’s election, with the possible exception of New Hampshire.

National Journal’s Ron Brownstein argues that Obama’s announcement “reflects a hard-headed acknowledgment of the changing nature of the Democratic electoral coalition”:

Indeed, historians may someday view Obama’s announcement Wednesday as a milestone in the evolution of his party’s political strategy, because it shows the president and his campaign team are increasingly comfortable responding to the actual coalition that elects Democrats today–not the one that many in the party remember from their youth. . . .

Obama’s announcement might not significantly change the overall level of his 2012 support, especially in an election where economic issues will dominate. But the announcement may reflect the Obama camp’s thinking about the likely composition of his support. It shows the president, however reluctantly, formulating an agenda that implicitly acknowledges the party is unlikely to recreate the support it attracted from the white working-class and senior voters who anchored Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Instead, the announcement shows him reaching out to mobilize the new pillars of the Democratic electorate, particularly younger people and socially liberal white collar whites.

So Obama makes up for ceding the squares and the crackers by picking up the hipsters and the eggheads. The average age of a Democratic voter drops, while the average IQ rises. Like Spinal Tap, the president’s appeal is becoming more selective.

But there are two problems with this analysis. First, squares tend to be much more reliable about actually going to the polls than hipsters do, and there aren’t enough eggheads who aren’t already with the Democrats to make up for the lost crackers.

Second, Brownstein seems to be taking only white voters into account. The Democratic coalition depends on overwhelming support from blacks and strong support from Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics alike are less apt than whites to support same-sex marriage. When California passed Proposition 8 in 2008, exit polls showed it had the support of 70% of blacks, 53% of Latinos and only 49% of whites. (Brownstein concedes this point in a companion piece, though his emphasis again is on the inverse correlation between age and support for same-sex marriage, which holds for minorities as well as whites.)

Obama’s support for same-sex marriage is almost certain to cut into his support among Hispanics and even blacks, leading some to vote for Romney and others to stay home. We’ll be very surprised if Obama fails to win a majority of Hispanics and the vast majority of blacks, but seemingly small changes can add up.

Example: Exit polls show that in 2004, blacks constituted 11% of the presidential electorate. In 2008 that figure rose to 13%. Blacks supported John Kerry over George W. Bush by 88% to 11% and Obama over John McCain by 95% to 4%.

That would mean Kerry got approximately 11.8 million black votes to Bush’s 1.5 million, while Obama got 16.2 million to McCain’s 0.6 million. Kerry’s margin among black voters was 10.3 million, Obama’s 15.6 million, an improvement of some 5.3 million, more than half his overall 9.5 million margin. These numbers aren’t exact, given the exit polls’ margin for error, but they do give a sense of how important a voting bloc can be, even when one party can take a large majority of its support for granted.

Mickey Kaus seems to realize that Obama’s flip isn’t likely to help him this November. He argues fancifully that the president has 2016 in mind. If Obama isn’t re-elected, Kaus speculates, “I think he’s going to run again, Grover Cleveland style.” By 2016, Kaus expects public opinion “to have shifted further in favor of this social innovation,” so that what is a risky position now will be helpful then.

It does seem to us that Obama may be looking ahead past 2012–to 2013. Remember how bitter and angry the left was last summer, when he looked like a loser–like someone who didn’t “fight”? (If not, click here.) That’s nothing compared to their bitterness after a Romney victory.

But if Obama loses after having endorsed same-sex marriage–and especially if his poll numbers experience an abrupt and permanent decline over the next few days–much of the left’s anger will be directed outward, at “homophobic” Middle America. Obama will begin his ex-presidency as a hero and a martyr. Unlike past losers like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, he won’t have to build a single house or lose his mind to rehabilitate himself.

There’s a danger in all this, however, for the Democratic Party. The more we think about it, the more it seems to us that Keli Goff is on to something with her argument that the gay mau-mauing of Obama is a racial humiliation:

The leadership in the LGBT activism community is not exactly known for its diversity. There has long been tension and resentment between the LGBT community and communities of color. Black voters were unfairly and inaccurately blamed for the Prop 8 debacle and were also strangely blamed by some for the defeat of gay marriage in predominantly white states. (Go figure.) This displacement of blame reeked of racism and was occasionally accompanied by blatantly racist language. . . .

There have also been plenty of vocally anti-gay black activists.

But President Obama is not one of them. Yet it seems that there are members of the gay community who will simply never trust him because he is black and a Christian and therefore must be anti-gay until he does everything they ask, when they ask it, to prove that he is not. This litmus test, which I have seen applied to no other leader, smacks of subtle prejudice, and yet his critics are too busy trying to prove that he is homophobic to see it.

If the electoral repudiation of the first black president is widely understood to have resulted from his being pressured to adopt a position the vast majority of blacks find repugnant, perhaps that will be the means by which the half-century-old bond between black America and the Democratic Party is dissolved.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”