The Secret Obama
...Gay marriage. He didn’t want to keep dissembling about his real position.

“Taken in sum, Obama’s list was a revealing document,” Halperin and Heilemann write. “He believed that over the past three years his progressive impulses had too often been trumped by the demands of pragmatism. That he had trimmed his sails in just the way his critics on the left had charged.”

Some of the aides thought Obama was sketching out a rough second-term agenda, but Chief of Staff Bill Daley had a different thought, according to the authors: “Holy sh**. We have a bunch of leakers here. I hope to God this doesn’t get out.”

As it turned out, it would all be kept under wraps except gay marriage, on which the president was preempted by Vice President Biden, although he had planned to announce the completion of his “evolution” on this issue anyway....