Few debates, politicians and media moments are as historically intertwined as JOE BIDEN and the interview he gave to NBC’s “Meet The Press” on May 6, 2012, during which he publicly expressed comfort with same-sex marriage. Looking back, the moment resembles a tree ring of sorts, not just for progress on the same-sex marriage fight, or the evolution of political media, but for Biden’s own transformation from an a Irish Catholic throwback to a leader of the modern Democratic Party. The interview was pre-taped on a Friday. BETSY FISCHER MARTIN, the executive producer of “Meet the Press” at the time, recalled for West Wing Playbook how Biden came in through the loading dock, past the dumpsters in the back of the old NBC studio on Nebraska Ave. in D.C. BARACK OBAMA had announced his reelection campaign that very weekend , which largely dictated the direction of the show. Then-host DAVID GREGORY pressed Biden on the state of the economy, recession fears, the threat of China, and whether Biden would actually remain on the ticket. Some 2,200 words were uttered before the topic of same-sex marriage came up (though Gregory and his team had prepared to ask about it). Biden’s answer now seems quaint: “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” But it set off a cascading political effect that led, in part, to Tuesday's signing of the Respect for Marriage Act. Just not at that exact moment. After the interview was done, Fischer Martin recalled, Biden posed for pictures, shook hands, and left the way he came in, seemingly unaware of the domino he’d just knocked over. “There was no immediate cleanup on the floor,” she said “I don't recall any hand wringing in the studio.” The “Meet the Press” crew, by contrast, knew it had something newsy. But they, too, didn’t fully comprehend the extent of it. “I don’t think we had an appreciation for how big or historical it would be,” Fischer Martin said. The real appreciation set in when the White House discovered Biden’s answer. Obama aides were not pleased, to put it mildly, as documented in SASHA ISSENBERG’ s seminal work, “The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle over Same-Sex Marriage.” They’d been looking at having Obama make his own evolution-of-views announcement on the daytime talk show, “The View,” in mid-May. Biden, moreover, had been the one warning Obama that embracing same-sex marriage could cost the ticket politically with Catholic voters. Administration officials back-channeled to CHUCK TODD, who was set to be on the “Meet the Press” panel following Biden’s interview (the panel was being broadcast live that Sunday), in an attempt at cleanup. It didn’t work. The next day, then-press secretary JAY CARNEY made more than 50 different attempts to explain how the president and vice president were — as he insisted — on the same page. Within days, White House officials had arranged Obama’s own interview so that he could publicly endorse same-sex marriage. In his book “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden conceded he “got out ahead of the president” but said Obama never upbraided him for it. Instead, he described the moment as almost cosmic. “I felt incredibly proud that day to have played some role in the gay marriage decision,” he wrote. “I thought of Beau, who as attorney general of Delaware made a point of attending a same-sex wedding on July 1, 2013, the day marriage equality was implemented in our state.” For Fischer Martin, it was one of the more memorable interviews in a tenure filled with many. But it was also a relic: A vice president doing a 40-minute Sunday show interview whose news value holds for days. Watching it now, it’s a time capsule just ten-and-a-half-years old but somewhat unrecognizable. “The way things move right now, you can book somebody on a Monday and the world is a totally different place on Friday,” she said. The “Meet the Press” interview itself was not responsible for the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. That honor goes to the decades of unrepentant activism spearheaded by a wide swath of leaders, many of whom weren’t around to see the bill signed. But a few major figures did contribute insider assistance to that outsider’s game. And, next to names like TIM GILL, ROBERTA KAPLAN, KEN MELHMAN, ANTHONY KENNEDY, TAMMY BALDWIN, GAVIN NEWSOM (who famously issued same-sex marriage licenses in San Francisco in 2004 while he was mayor) and others, stands Biden, largely for meeting the press that Sunday in May. MESSAGE US — Are you ANTHONY KENNEDY? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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