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How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
I would argue that this is mostly orthogonal to which side has more of a cult of personality. Historically, I think most cults of personality are closer to falling in line -- believing that that guy is just the right man for the job -- than falling in love -- believing that that charming guy is actually a very decent person.
Sure, Obama had some cult of personality, but he was equally the figurehead of an ideological movement. If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant. By contrast, Trump has much more slack. The evangelicals who voted for him to get Dobbs certainly did not love him as a faithful Christian. He was a sinful tool for them, but he was the tool which got the job done. And the dissatisfied poor people did not vote for him because they precisely shared his philosophical beliefs about tariffs. They were simply dissatisfied with how the DC elites ran things, and correctly noticed that these elites really hated Trump, and correctly figured out that they could piss off these elites maximally by electing him. (Immigration is the other motive, and one where Trump's hands are likely tied. Opening the borders is something which his base would not forgive him -- like Hitler converting to Judaism or Stalin declaring himself a Tsar. So I guess that all movements are some fraction ideology and some fraction cult of personality, only that modern left-wing movements are stronger on the ideological side.)
Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!
Anyone know to what extent it was an open secret among activists that Obama was pro-gay marriage, but thought "take what you can get" was the better political strategy? He had been more transparent, as a State Senator.
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This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/
Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.
Huh, I either hadn't heard of or forgot about him opposing gay marriage in 2010, after his election. The general running narrative among Democrats in my sphere is that Obama had cynically lied in 2008 about his opposition to gay marriage in a (what turned out to be successful) bid to gain voters for his presidential election. This was an openly stated belief during the 2008 campaign before he got elected, and it seemed to be the common belief the last time I encountered the topic among my peers a few years ago, and I generally leaned in the direction of believing that, but now I'm wondering if he really was stating his honest beliefs, which actually truly changed over time.
I don't know how old you or your peers are, but I was in law school in 2008 and was following both the primary and general election campaigns pretty closely. There wasn't any consensus among Democrats at the time regarding the gay marriage issue. Minority voters were generally opposed to it, and the only people seriously in favor were activists and gay people themselves. Even the more leftist wing of the party didn't exactly place a top priority on it. The mainstream opinion, held by both Obama and Clinton, was to be in favor of civil unions and against statewide initiatives to prohibit gay marriage outright. They basically punted, and it basically worked, since the issue was at the bottom of most voters' list of priorities. Republicans would occasionally bait Democrats with the issue since gay marriage wasn't particularly popular among the general public at the time, but the moderate, boring, amorphous position gave them sufficient cover that only the true religious firebrands bothered to bait them that often. Neither Obama nor McCain mentioned it much during the 2008 campaign.
I'm probably around your age or a little younger, as I had very recently graduated college in 2008, and most of my peers were around my age. We were in Massachusetts, which had already legalized gay marriage by that point, and our perception was that gay marriage was so obviously a human right (it was vanishingly rare to encounter people socially who didn't agree with this - the few times we did, that person was usually socially ostracized by people within my circle - I was never enough of a social butterfly to have much influence over or feel much impact of these decisions) that either mainstream Dem politicians who were against it and for civil unions were just making cynical, calculated decisions to misrepresent their true beliefs for the purpose of not scaring off the superstitious/bigoted conservatives (including the more conservative/religious Democratic voters) or were just superstitious/bigoted themselves due to clinging to religion.
For Obama specifically, we almost definitely projected a lot of our own values onto him as the avatar of Hope and Change who would lead us out of the dark Bush 2 years. With gay marriage, we thought it was basically an open secret that he was cynically lying about his opposition to it, and plenty of us, including myself, also had a lot of confidence that he was actually an atheist cynically lying about his faith in Christianity.
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It did lead to the weird situation where Trump entered office as the first non-incumbent who was not opposed to gay marriage.
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