Before Biden's comments, Obama had planned to announce his support by the DNC. | AP Photos W.H.: Biden forced Obama's hand

For President Barack Obama and his team, the decision to back gay marriage came down to a choice between two unpalatable alternatives: Support it and brave the backlash in battleground states where the issue could be a liability — or keep silent and be accused by allies of gutlessness and putting politics over principle.

Administration officials said the president planned to announce his support before the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., this September. But they acknowledge that Vice President Joe Biden did, indeed, force their hand.


The claims about timing contradict senior Democrats and some Obama campaign officials who have said that Obama was undecided about making an announcement before the election to avoid losing religiously conservative swing voters in states like North Carolina, Ohio and Colorado.

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Obama’s famous “evolution” on the issue ended about three months ago, they say, after Obama pondered the courage of New York state lawmakers in passing their marriage equality law. This, even though the New York action happened six months before.

Senior officials, speaking under the ground rules of not providing direct quotations, said the political impact of the decision was entirely unpredictable, but that the issue isn’t likely to be a major factor in November’s general election result.

They also said most voters already assume Obama supports gay and lesbian nuptials, blunting the impact of the decision.

They refused to answer detailed questions about the specifics of Obama’s deliberations — or how he overcame his religious concerns, as a Christian, with gay marriage. Around a half-dozen top Obama advisers have been deliberating the timing of making the announcement and planned to do it over the summer.

( PHOTOS: Celebrity tweets on gay marriage)

In the end, people close to the president say, it wasn’t a close call: 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.

If Biden’s comments were the catalyst for Wednesday’s historic announcement, Jay Carney was the immediate trigger, officials said. The White House press secretary took a serious drubbing on Monday when reporters all but accused the White House of cowardice on the issue.

Obama made his announcement to save Carney, an official joked.

And so the president took the final step Wednesday in his “evolving” views of a major gay rights issue.

“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama said in a White House interview with ABC News’s Robin Roberts.

Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, the first ever from a sitting president, came amid growing pressure for the president to clarify his previously muddled opinion, as two senior members of his administration announced personal support for gay marriage and a day after voters in North Carolina approved a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The statement brought an immediate reaction from his prospective opponent.

“My view is that marriage itself is a relationship between a man and a woman, and that’s my own preference,” the candidate said at a brief news conference in Oklahoma City after Obama’s remarks were released. “I know other people have differing views — this is a very tender and sensitive topic, as are many social issues. But I have the same view that I’ve had since running for office.”

Romney backs a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and was opposed to the Massachusetts state court decision legalizing gay marriage issued while he was governor.

Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage was hotly anticipated — and actively sought — among many LGBT and progressive voters who were frustrated that the president would not speak out in favor of gay marriage despite a record on other gay rights issues that includes repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” and ending the Justice Department’s defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Obama acknowledged Wednesday that he had held off taking the final step of supporting gay marriage because he knew that doing so would upset some supporters.

“I’ve stood on the side of broader equality for the LGBT community. I hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought civil unions would be sufficient,” he said. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word ‘marriage’ evokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs.”

Obama’s pivot came close on the heels of Vice President Joe Biden’s acknowledgement Sunday on “Meet the Press” that he is “absolutely comfortable” with men marrying men and women marrying women, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s affirmation in an interview Monday on MSNBC that he also supports gay marriage.

Roberts said during a special report on ABC on Wednesday afternoon that Obama said he’d planned to announce his changed views on gay marriage before the election in November, though perhaps not this soon. But, Roberts indicated, the president wasn’t upset that Biden and Duncan had spoken out.

Obama said Wednesday he is confident that support for gay marriage will continue to expand over time. When he visits college campuses, it’s clear that students “are much more comfortable with it” than older generations.

The same is true for his daughters. “You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples,” Obama said. “There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them, and frankly that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”

First lady Michelle Obama’s views on gay marriage were also influential in the decision making, he said.

“This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do,” the president said. “In the end, the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people.”

Though supporting gay marriage could put them at odds with other Christians, Obama said that when he and his wife think about their faith, “the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.”

Obama said in late 2010 that his views on gay marriage were “evolving,” and since then administration officials have pointed to those comments, stressing that Obama is a supporter of gay rights who has overseen the end of “don’t ask” and whose Justice Department has stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

A Gallup Poll released Tuesday showed that 50 percent of Americans said they support the legalization of gay marriage, while 65 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents said the same. But support for gay marriage doesn’t reach across party lines: Among Republicans surveyed, 27 percent said they support legalizing gay marriage.

On Tuesday, 61 percent of voters in North Carolina — a state that Obama won in 2008 and that’s considered key to many of his paths to a second term — approved a ballot measure that strengthened the state’s ban on gay marriage with a constitutional amendment to do so.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement that “while President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney have been clear. We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that.”