You know they’ve hit bottom when even lefty blog Mediaite attacks them.
Via Mediaite:
On Monday, Alex Wagner invited fellow MSNBC hosts Martin Bashir and Al Sharpton on her midday program to discuss the political impact of Obama’s support for gay marriage as registered in a new CBS/New York Times poll: the verdict in the poll was that the news is not good for team Obama. In fact, the news was so bad that Bashir took to arguing with the respondents have “accused” Obama of making a political calculation. Those voters, Shaprton said, should be “smarter” than to think Obama won political points with his pivot. Their resentment is, well, misguided.
Wagner asked “Rev.” Sharpton if he thought it was a problem for Obama that the findings in a new CBS/New York Times poll that showed 67 percent of voters viewed the President’s embrace of gay marriage rights as a political maneuver while only 24 percent said they believed he was moved to support same-sex marriage out of principle.
Sharpton said that Obama would have to address that issue, but also said that the voters were dead wrong that it could have been a political calculation because Obama has not benefited politically from the announcement.
“As you go down the rest of the poll, there was not that much of a political advantage here, and if anything he got some flack in his own base,” said Sharpton. “So, I think that those who have been made to believe or believe on their own he did it for political reasons would then have to look at the results and say you have to be smarter than that to know that he was not going to gain politically because he didn’t.”
Where to begin? First, Sharpton has confused political opponents of President Obama with registered voters. That 67 percent of registered voters probably includes significant overlap among Obama supporters and opponents.
Second, is it not at least excusable for a voter to think that Obama made a political calculation when he embraced gay marriage seeing as how he contradicted himself on the matter several times over the course of his career? Indeed, Obama only embraced gay marriage after his Vice President publically contradicted him and the White House was hounded by the press for almost 72 consecutive hours to clarify the President’s official position.