President Obama held a White House press conference Friday afternoon to discuss the sequester, which takes effect officially this evening. But when reporter Christi Parsons of the Chicago Tribune got her chance to ask a question, she didn’t ask about the sequester at all. Instead, the Obama-friendly journalist lobbed the president a softball regarding California’s Proposition 8, which enshrines traditional marriage into the Golden State's constitution: [Video below. MP3 audio here.]
"Mr. President, your administration weighed in yesterday on the Proposition 8 case. A few months ago it looked like you might be averse to doing that. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about your deliberations and how your thinking evolved on that. Were there conversations that were important to you? Were there things that you read that influenced your thinking?"
Here we go again with the praise for the president’s “evolution.” Ever since Obama switched his position on same-sex marriage last year, many journalists have cooed about how the chief executive “evolved” on the topic. Never mind that, by that logic, the president devolved from his days as as state senator in the 1990s, when he supported same-sex marriage.
I can only imagine Parsons’ question if a Republican president changed his mind about a major issue: “So, why the flip-flop, Mr. President?”
But wait, there's more. Parsons was not done. After the president gave his answer, she asked this follow-up:
"And given the fact that you do hold that position about gay marriage, I wonder if you thought about just once you made the decision to weigh in, why not just argue that marriage is a right that should be available to all people in this country?"
If it wasn’t clear before, now it’s clear that Parsons is a gay marriage advocate. Obama is a very liberal president, but she just managed to attack him from the left over this issue. Actually, “attack” is probably too strong a word. She gently tugged his hand from the left, trying to pull him over to where she stands.
This is not the first time Parsons has acted like an Obama fan girl at a press conference. In November 2012, Parsons congratulated Obama on his reelection and exclaimed to him, “I have never seen you lose!”
Sadly, Christi Parsons is not an anomaly. She is only one more example of the media’s fawning lovefest with Barack Obama.
