BIDEN: Looking at your kids, most you have kids here, and it was the first time in my career, my life, I realized someone could go out and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here — but it’s more important, you’re more important.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart, they never get there again, that there was never going to get — there never going to be that way ever again. That’s how an awful lot you have feel.

There will come a day, I promise you, and you parents as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. [...]

So, hang onto each other. Hang onto each other. And I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you how deeply the five of us on this stage feel about the sacrifices you’ve made for this country. That doesn’t — that doesn’t fill the black hole. You should know only 1 percent of you have fought these wars and much less thank God than 1 percent of those that fought the wars are going through what you’re going through.

We owe you more than we can ever, ever repay you. As I said, my prayer is that that smile will come sooner than later, but I promise you it will come. God bless you all and my God protect our troops. Thank you.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired a clip of Biden’s speech:

When Biden was tapped as President Obama’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, the reasons were obvious: he was an older, blindingly white Senator with a strong, long list of credentials including helping to torpedo Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, an event that took place the year before Obama entered Harvard Law School. His penchant for gaffes—he had previously described Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”—was acknowledged and considered a worthwhile risk given the other qualities he brought to the ticket.

And instead of being an enormous liability, Biden’s volubility became something of a meme. He made the rounds at Inaugural Balls quoting Seamus Heaney. To The Onion, he was a gold mine. The fake newspaper churned out stories about Biden washing a Trans Am shirtless, or getting banned from Dave and Buster’s, or fleeing to Mexico. Biden was apparently aware and appreciative of the stories. The Vice President was a perfect subject of cultural jokes, a tendency that couldn’t have been predicted (ditto for the sudden coolness of Hillary Clinton), but that in retrospect is very, very useful for taking heat off a president accused of being a celebrity and a lightweight. The Vice President is never supposed to overshadow the President, but in matters light and weighty alike, Biden does seem to have created space for Obama.

And so there’s something fitting and hilarious about the fact that Biden is headed to Jeopardy, off to be his likable self for a generation of viewers who weren’t going to be impressed by President Obama Slow Jamming the News with Jimmy Fallon and the roots. Part of this administration’s appeal has been its ability to bridge generations, but whether your thing is trivia games or mic drops, Biden and Obama’s collective arrival at this point is a reminder that we don’t, and shouldn’t, have to wait for generational turnover to see stances, policies, and lives change.

A ThinkProgress analysis of cable news coverage of the Biden story from Monday at 6:00 AM to 11:59 PM using TV Eyes shows that while MSNBC ran the most segments with the word “marriage,” conservative firebrand Fox News also devoted substantial airtime to the story. Almost without exception, the coverage criticized the administration for obfuscating on the issue without challenging Biden’s support for same-sex marriage or debating the policy merits of the issue.

Even Fox News — which ran the only segment in which a guest claimed that marriage equality would lead to a nation where “one person can marry 3 people” — focused on the politics of the debate and avoided labeling Biden or other Democrats who have embraced same-sex marriage as extremists. The network typically eschews LGBT-friendly stories altogether:

The tenor of the conversation is in sharp contrast to the hysterical and often times offensive remarks made about gay people during the 2004 election — when the Bush campaign sought to employ marriage is a way to rally its conservative electoral base — and may reflect the popular shift towards equality.

For instance, a recent survey from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that support for marriage equality has increased substantially since 2004, with 47 percent of Americans now favoring same-sex marriage — up from 31 percent in 2004. Pew also found that for the first time, “there is as much strong support as strong opposition to gay marriage. In the current survey, 22 percent say they strongly support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally; an identical percentage (22 percent) strongly opposes gay marriage. In 2008, there was about twice as much strong opposition to as strong support for gay marriage (30 percent vs. 14 percent).”

This growing public sentiment for the freedom to marry, the burgeoning political support for the issue, and the tepid tone of the media conversation all reinforce the notion that the freedom to marry has become a mainstream political position that — while still rife with political pitfalls among some constituents — is now treated as a legitimate establishment view.

NOM's Brian Brown

Opponents of marriage equality are not happy that Vice President Joe Biden expressed his support for marriage equality yesterday. They’ve taken to Twitter and other outlets today to mock the White House, accusing Biden of being off-message and reiterating their standard anti-gay talking points. Here’s a selection:

BRYAN FISCHER: President Obama is a homophobic bigot: won’t endorse gay marriage like the enlightened Joe Biden. http://ow.ly/aJYqJ

TONY PERKINS: Ok, Mr. Vice President, how about 3′s Company? Two Guys & a Girl? Sitcoms are the inspiration for this admin’s policies? I’m not laughing!

BRIAN BROWN: It’s always hard to know what Vice President Biden is doing whenever he speaks. He could be launching a trial balloon, or he could just be being Biden with his foot in his mouth again. Whether he realizes it or not, Biden is declaring war on  those 30 states in America that have adopted constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman… What Joe Biden wants—genderless marriage that kowtows to the demands of gay couples—cannot exist alongside traditional marriage.

Such aggrandizing rhetoric unsurprisingly distorts the entire conversation on the freedom to marry. For simply wanting all couples to have the “same exact rights,” Biden is “declaring war” and promoting polygamy? Hardly.

But this afternoon, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter seemed to admit that Biden’s remarks did in fact go further than the administration’s stated position:

MITCHELL: The question to Joe Biden was not about civil unions. The question to Joe Biden was about marriage. Marriage is different from civil rights, civil unions, equal protection under the law. Marriage is a sacrament and a legal sacrament that the Vice President was asked about it and he said he had no problem with it. That is not the same.

CUTTER: He said he had no problem with committed couples forming….he was really impressing the same policies as this president, as this administration….

MITCHELL: [Biden said] ‘I’m absolutely comfortable with men marrying men and women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same equal rights.”… Is the President of the United States comfortable, as the Vice President said, ‘with men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying another’?

CUTTER: Andrea, I’m not going to make news on the president’s views on gay marriage today.

Watch it:

Chuck Todd observed that “this episode sort of forces the conversation” and predicted that the administration will come out for marriage equality before the Democratic National Convention in September.

The comments came just as the LGBT community had grown frustrated with President Obama’s alleged evolution toward supporting marriage equality and admonished the administration for failing to issue an executive order that would have prohibited employers who contract with the federal government from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

But rather than finally confronting those who oppose granting gay and lesbian people all of the same legal rights and protections of their heterosexual counterparts and embracing Biden’s remarks, the White House and the campaign — after two days of considering their response — settled on pretending they didn’t happen. After the segment aired Sunday morning, administration officials hurriedly tweeted that Biden’s position was consistant with Obama’s. They said that had not endorsed full equality after all and implied that his claim that gays are “entitled to the same exact rights” apparently didn’t extend to marriage. The message beecame even more confused after one official told NBC’s Chuck Todd that Biden was only speaking for “himself” on the issue:

– HE WAS ONLY SPEAKING FOR HIMSELF: As NBC’s Chuck Todd revealed following Biden’t interview, “the Vice President’s office reached out to me to say, yes we know the vice president was speaking about himself. He is not speaking speaking for the administration. And they pointed out like the president he is evolving on this issue.”

– HE DID NOT ENDORSE MARRIAGE: David Axelrod tweeted, “@chucktodd @meetthepress What VP said-that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights-is precisely POTUS’s position.”

– HE IS STILL EVOLVING ON MARRIAGE: “The vice president was saying what the president has said previously – that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to rollback those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it. Beyond that, the Vice President was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.

And so the joy that LGBT advocate groups felt upon hearing Biden’s remarks turned to confusion. The Center for American Progress’ Winnie Stachelberg noted that while “We commend Vice President Biden for supporting marriage equality and call on President Obama to do the same. The campaign shouldn’t force Biden’s comments back into the closet, but should instead embrace the growing popular support for the freedom to marry.” Obama aides have previously sought to squash the perception that members of the administration are more supportive of the LGBT community than the president and have walked back the remarks of Michelle Obama and Melody Barnes .

The Human Rights Campaign’s incoming president Chad Griffin, however, noted that Biden’s remarks — and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s surprise embrace of same-sex marriage Monday morning — presented the administration with an opportunity. Griffin asked, “Is there even a question?” that Biden has evolved in his thinking, and added: “His words speak for themselves — and they send an incredibly important message outside Washington to the young LGBT teenager hearing the vice president of the United States talk about his belief in marriage equality and the fact that he or she can grow up and have the same dreams and aspirations as their friends, their colleagues, their parents.”

For a president seeking to reconnect with young people and reclaim the spark of 2008, this sounds like a message worth embracing.

Biden made his remarks during an appearance on Meet the Press, telling host David Gregory that he is “absolutely comfortable with…men marrying men, women marrying women.” He added, however, that “the President sets the policy” and did not say if he would support marriage in a second term. Biden credited the change-of-heart to the show Will & Grace, which aired on NBC from 1998 to 2006 and featured numerous gay characters:

GREGORY: Have your views evolved?

BIDEN: The good news is that as more and more Americans come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition. Who do you love? Who do you love and will you be loyal to the person you love? And that’s what people are finding out what all marriages at their root are about. Whether they are marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals. [...]

GREGORY: You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?

BIDEN: Look, I am Vice President of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that. [...] I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far. People fear that is different and now they’re beginning to understand.

Watch it:

Biden has backed equal rights for the LGBT community throughout his career, but this is the first time he has publicly acknowledged his support of full marriage rights.

In December of 2010, Biden predicted, “I think the country’s evolving and I think there’s an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage.”

But when asked if he supports gay marriage during the 2008 Vice Presidential debate Biden was far more circumspect, saying, “No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.” He even sought common ground with Sarah Palin on the issue and noted that both believe that “there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple.”

Since that performance, the administration has touted its accomplishments on behalf of the LGBT community — from the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to its refusal to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Yet Biden’s support for marriage could excite the LGBT community — many of whom have recently expressed outrage over Obama’s unwillingness to issue an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination in federal contracting — just ahead of the 2012 election.

Obama first told blogger Joe Sudbay that “attitudes evolve [on marriage equality] including mine” in October of 2010 and the administration last commented on his position during a press gaggle on March 30, 2012. “I don’t anticipate that the President would make news on [marriage equality],” Press Deputy Josh Earnest told a reporter en route to Burlington, Vermont when asked about Obama’s “evolving position.”

Gay and lesbian couples can wed in six states and the District of Columbia. Washington and Maryland both passed same-sex marriage laws in 2012, but they are currently being challenged by voter referenda.

Update

The campaign is trying to walk back Biden’s remarks:

Update

Will & Grace star Debra Messing praises Biden:

At the time, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney slammed Biden’s proposal. “Instead of promoting pro-growth tax policies that provide businesses with the economic freedom to grow and prosper, he is backing a ‘global tax’ that would harm American competitiveness,” Romney said. At a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday, however, Romney feigned ignorance of the proposal:

ROMNEY: And the vice president says he wants to do a global tax on multinationals. Not sure what that is, but it doesn’t sound very good.

Watch it:

Under the global tax plan, the 26 corporations that haven’t paid taxes in the last four years would actually have to pay taxes. So would Apple, which used offshore tax havens to dodge $2.4 billion in taxes last year. Romney’s plan, by contrast, would cut corporate taxes and the tax on profits corporations bring from overseas. His justification: America’s high corporate tax rate hurts competitiveness, and the lower repatriation rate will boost job growth. In reality, American corporations pay one of the world’s lowest tax rates, and the last repatriation holiday was a complete failure.

It’s no secret why Romney doesn’t want to talk about the global minimum tax. While his plan would provide a massive giveaway to American corporations, the plan Biden floated would actually raise corporate tax revenues — something a vast majority of Americans support.

Romney now says that “of course” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account. “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is, the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were.

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.

Failed Supreme Court Nominee Robert Bork

Mitt Romney, however, apparently finds this kind of outlook quite appealing, because he selected Bork to co-chair his “Justice Advisory Committee.” At a recent campaign event, Vice President Biden went after Romney for his poor judgment in selecting Bork for this role:

[Biden] addressed specifically the issue of contraception, saying that he “noticed today” that Judge Robert Bork, “a fine man, and a man who I disagree with a lot,” had been named as the Romney campaign’s “justice coordinator.” (He appeared to have read an editorial in today’s New York Times which addressed this fact. Bork was actually named as a chair of Romney’s “Justice Advisory Committee” last August, a Romney spokesperson confirmed.)

He discussed the Bork confirmation hearings, which he oversaw as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the discussion of Griswold vs. Connecticut.

“So we’re kind of returning to the past. You know that movie, ‘Back To the Future?’ It feels like to me that we’re going Back to the Future,” he said.

Not too long ago, of course, the Romney campaign spent days pretending to believe that President Obama’s own view of motherhood was somehow in question because someone who has no association with his campaign said something dumb on CNN. Meanwhile, Romney continues to trust Bork as one of his top legal policy advisors — even after Bork claimed that there’s no such thing as discrimination against women and that women who think there is are “silly.”

But the strangest criticism came from former U.N. ambassador John Bolton who claimed that a laugh-line in Biden’s speech showed that New York University (NYU) students, where the speech was delivered, don’t believe the president is strong on foreign policy. Bolton explained to Fox News’ Greta Van Sustern:

BOLTON: But I thought the best part of it was at one point, trying to appropriate yet another Republican president, Biden said, ‘you have to speak softly and carry a big stick.’ And then he said, ‘I promise you, President Obama has a big stick.’ And the audience broke out laughing, which is some measure of their belief about how assertive Obama is on behalf of our interests internationally.

VAN SUSTEREN: Yes, it’s — apparently, that’s also going to — that’s made a couple — a lot of — a lot of jokes, too, on the Internet. It is — apparently, that is something that’s not going to go away, at least for a while, for Vice President Biden, that remark.

BOLTON: Yet another one.

Watch it:

It’s unclear if the NYU audience was laughing at, or with, Biden. The Vice President maintained a dead-pan expression during the brief outbreak of laughter.

Indeed, Van Susteren is correct that the “big stick” comment has generated a great deal of attention, although not all of it negative, on the internet. CBS, ABC, NBC and The Huffington Post all published articles with headlines incorporating the statement “Obama ‘has a big stick,’” in the minutes and hours after the speech was delivered.

The fact that Bolton interpreted the laughter as a critical response to the administration’s foreign policy doctrine is bizarre considering the former U.N. ambassador’s penchant for bellicose rhetoric when describing his domination-focused foreign policy positions. Last summer, Bolton opined that the U.S. “should be squeezing and disciplining Moscow, not caressing it.”

Asked by a reporter about Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comments last week that the Obama administration-led U.N. sanctions program on Iran have been “effective,” the Romney advisers said:

DAN SENOR: (T)he administration has gone out of its way to convey that the military option is not serious. I mean, just look at the things Secretary [of Defense Leon] Panetta has said over the last year, whether it was at the Halifax conference, whether it was the Saban conference at Brookings… He went out of his way to talk about how disastrous military action against Iran would be for the United States, for the global economy, for the region. …

ALEX WONG: The administration has repeatedly talked down the military option and the effectiveness and the (inaudible) of the military option by the united states and Israel.

Listen to a clip of the call here:

Romney’s advisers offer, at best, misleading interpretations of Obama administration policies and statements; at worst, they make claims unsupported by the facts. For example, far from “project[ing] to the world that the military option against Iran is off the table,” Obama has said again and again that all options remain “on the table” to deal with a potential Iranian nuclear weapons program. A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime, though U.S. and Israeli intelligence have not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon.

Senor says that Panetta disavowed the military option at his speech to the Brookings Institution. In reality, he did the opposite: “The president has made it very clear that we have not taken any options off the table.” Senor’s harping on Panetta misfired in other ways. It was not Panetta but his predecessor Robert Gates who said a war with Iran would be “disastrous” — but Gates made those comments when he was serving in the Bush administration in 2008.

Panetta has, however, warned of potential consequences of an attack — precisely those factors that lead the administration to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis. “There are going to be economic consequences to that, that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy,” he said last November. Indeed, business leaders and other experts have discussed potential economic consequences of an attack.

Rather than “talk[ing] down,” as Wong put it, a military attack on Iran, these leaders and experts are merely doing what a good democracy should: having an honest discourse about what an attack would mean. Former top Israeli security officials, for example, have discussed the risks of a regional war, a “devastating impact,” and the possibility that an attack would only delay Iran’s nuclear program. As Obama himself said:

If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be.

Senor’s role in burying potential consequences of a war should not be taken lightly. He was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq in the early days after the invasion. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, then of the Washington Post, Senor once said: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.” Senor also had other roles in propagating a rose-tinted picture of Iraq — in line with the “cakewalk” the Bush administration had falsely promised — even as the country descended to a civil war.

Senor said twice on the call that the Romney campaign is “not suggesting the military option should be used.” As Biden eventually said in his speech today, “Governor Romney has called for what he calls a ‘very different policy’ on Iran. But for the life of me it’s hard to understand what the governor means by a very different policy.”

But Biden’s harshest reprimand of Romney was saved for the former Massachusetts governor’s critique of President Obama’s Iran policy. Romney has swung between essentially endorsing the Obama administration’s policy of diplomacy plus pressure — via sanctions — to calling for outright military action against Iran. Biden said:

Here’s what he says. He says we need “crippling sanctions,” apparently unaware that through President Obama’s leadership we produced just that, crippling sanctions. He emphasizes the need for “a credible military option” and “a regular presence of aircraft carrier groups” in the region, apparently ignorant of the fact that’s exactly what our policy is and what we’re doing.

Biden singled out Romney’s criticisms of the White House’s Iran-policy as “counterproductive” and promoting “loose talk of war” that could ultimately hurt the international sanctions regime engineered by the administration:

I think it’s fair to say the only step we could take that we aren’t already taking is to launch a war against Iran. If that’s what governor Romney means by a “very different policy” then he should tell the American people. He should say so. Otherwise the governor’s tough talk about military action is just that, talk. And I would add, counterproductive talk. Folks, loose talk about a war has incredibly negative consequences in our efforts to end Iran’s nuclear quest. And let me tell you why, because it unsettles world oil markets. It drives up oil prices. When oil prices go up, Iran’s coffers fill up, undermining the effect of the sanctions that are already in place. This type of Romney Talk is just not smart.

Watch it:

Romney’s foreign policy advisers — in a press call before Biden’s speech — seemed to inadvertently validate Biden’s charge of the Romney campaign’s “Cold War mindset.” Romney foreign policy adviser Pierre Prosper claimed that, under the Obama administration, “The United States abandoned its missile defense sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia” — of which the latter dissolved nearly 20 years ago after the fall of the U.S.S.R. And on the same call, another adviser, former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehman, warned of a the threat from “the Soviets” in the Arctic region.

Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Vice President Biden shot back at Romney, calling him “uninformed“:

BIDEN: But what I think is most revealing about it is the Governor’s response. The Governor talking about this hurts Israel. He either hasn’t been informed yet or doesn’t know that this missile defense system we put in, and I was responsible as you remember for going to Europe and selling the new system which better protects them, also better protects Israel and in terms of the early warning capability. I mean, he just seems to be uninformed, or stuck in a Cold War mentality. So, I think what the– the exchange did, it exposes how little the Governor knows about foreign policy.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, Romney is uninformed. Since President Obama took office in 2009, the United States security commitment to Israel increased significantly and is unprecedented. Top Israeli officials regularly make this point. In fact, similar baseless GOP claims on Obama and Israel led the Associated Press to get involved. An AP “fact check” notes that Republican attacks on Obama that he’s not sufficiently pro-Israel “have strayed well beyond reality.”

Just last week, the Pentagon asked Congress for more money for Israel’s Iron Dome system which is designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars. In recent weeks, the system was credited for intercepting more than 80 percent of the nearly 300 rockets fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza into southern Israel. “Supporting the security of the state of Israel is a top priority of President Obama and Secretary Panetta,” DOD spokesman George Little said in a statement.

Later on Face the Nation yesterday, Newt Gingrich also had trouble sticking to reality on Obama and Israel. Gingrich claimed that in a previous “hot-mic” incident with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama made a “derogatory reference to Israel.” “It was Sarkozy complaining about Prime Mister Netanyahu of Israel, and Obama actually sort of trumping him and saying it’s even worse I have to deal with him every day.” In fact, as Media Matters pointed out, Obama was actually advocating for Israel’s position at the time, requesting that Sarkozy ask the Palestinians to slow their push for U.N. membership.

And during a speech in Florida today, even Vice President Biden used the toy analogy to attack Romney for his support of the GOP’s radical Cut, Cap, And Balance plan:

Gov. Romney supports Cut, Cap, and Balance, which is yet another demonstration that there is no daylight between Gov. Romney and Republican leaders on the most important issues facing this country. And not even Romney’s Etch A Sketch can change that.

Watch Biden’s comments:

As we’ve noted before, Cut, Cap, and Balance “would require a 25 percent cut to everything in the federal budget — from Social Security to veterans’ benefits to the Pentagon to education.”

Aerial photo of site for Fisker Automotive facility in Delaware, made possible by a clean energy loan program

by Dave Roberts in a Grist cross-post

Here we go again.

ABC News and iWatch have a big new report out that desperately tries to lend an air of scandal to another Department of Energy loan guarantee. It’s a remarkable package, nearly 3,000 words and three ABC News segments full of handwaving and innuendo suggesting that there’s something shady going on, using the word “Solyndra” as often as possible, but in the end there’s … nothing. Not a single bit of evidence of wrongdoing or corruption. It’s a gigantic nothingburger. It just describes the loan program working exactly as it was intended to, but in a tone of dark insinuation.

The fact that there’s no there there will of course not impede the U.S. scandal machine. Already the Drudge Report has linked it, Sarah Palin has Tweeted it, right-wing blogs are flogging it … Next thing you know, other media will be hyping it to, because, you know, “questions have been raised.” And it’s off to the races all over again.

Just for the record, let’s walk through the facts.

The loan program in question is the $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program, established in 2007 by the energy bill passed under George W. Bush. It’s intended to speed the introduction of more efficient vehicles into the U.S. market and help stand up domestic industries to supply those vehicles.

The ATVM program was fully funded in 2008 and began issuing loans in 2009. In June of that year, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the first three recipients: $5.9 billion to Ford, $1.6 billion to Nissan, and $465 million to electric automaker Tesla.

Then, in September 2009, DOE announced a fourth recipient: $529 million to California-based Fisker Automotive. The loan was finalized in April 2010 and announced at an event with Vice President Joe Biden.

At the time, Fisker had one vehicle under development and another planned, both plug-in hybrids; the loan was split between them. The smaller portion, $169 million, was devoted to helping Fisker work with U.S. suppliers to finish up the Karma, a $97,000 four-door luxury sedan. The larger portion, $359 million, was devoted to Project Nina, Fisker’s plan to develop a mid-market plug-in sedan. The company expects the Nina to cost around $39,000 and be in mass production (75,000-100,000 a year) by late 2012, with delivery to begin in 2013.

Everything seems to be going roughly according to plan. Fisker hasn’t missed any loan payments or asked for any further loans. Some regulatory issues pushed the Karma production schedule back a bit, but the first few are on the road now and there are 3,000 pre-orders for more. In October 2009, Fisker purchased the Wilmington Assembly plant in Delaware, which was owned by General Motors from 1947 until it was shut down in July 2009, to manufacture its Nina. The DOE loan is being used, in part, to renovate and upgrade the plant. In June 2011, Fisker started its first round of hiring, bringing on 120 engineers, technicians, and production workers at the plant.

So far so good, right? Sounds like what the 2007 Congress envisioned and Obama promised: a boost for a promising new U.S. company; jobs in an industry that’s been hit hard by the downturn; groundwork put in place for what promises to be a huge growth market. Where’s the scandal?

Like I said, the ABC/iWatch story is filled with vague insinuations, but I’ll try to extract and address the main charges, such as they are.

1. This is a subsidy for rich people.

The Karma is extremely expensive — around $100,000. It is indeed a car for rich people; the very first one off the production line went to Leonardo DiCaprio. Al Gore’s in line for one too. Yes, DiCaprio and Gore; this is a field day for gossipy media.

However, some perspective is in order. A small start-up trying to break into an automotive market dominated by huge, well-established incumbents has to start at the high end. It doesn’t yet have economies of scale or mass production capabilities; it needs to prove that it can create a working, reliable car; and it just needs to attract attention. Tesla did the same thing for the same reason. It’s a way to attract more investment.

So in a sense, yes, all government assistance to electric vehicles (or batteries) is “a subsidy to rich people” for the moment, because cutting-edge new products are expensive. The whole point of the assistance is to drive the cost down and accelerate the introduction of the products to a larger mass market.

Tesla and Fisker are both starting with high-end models and then moving aggressively into lower cost mass-market models. And remember: The bulk of the loan to Fisker is to support the Nina.

2. The cars are made in Finland.

As founder Henrik Fisker said, “There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle. They don’t exist here.” So the Karma is being assembled at a plant in Finland.

ABC seems convinced that we should be outraged by this. Taxpayers lending money to a company building cars overseas! Scandal-ish!

But, again: The DOE loan is specifically earmarked for spending inside the U.S. None of it will be spent in Finland. And, again: Fisker is in the process of upgrading a plant in Delaware to manufacture its next car.

And finally, I don’t know about you, but when I hear that a U.S. electric-vehicle company can’t find a manufacturer in the U.S. capable of assembling its cars, my first thought is not, “Well, screw that company, let’s not help them!” It’s, “Criminy, we need to get started creating the industrial infrastructure to support a domestic electric-vehicle industry!”

3. Fisker is a risky bet.

The ABC story makes this point as though it’s exposing some dark secret. But of course it’s f’ing risky! That’s the whole point: to help companies on the cutting edge, companies trying to break into established markets and shake up the status quo. Those companies are, by definition, risky. That’s why Congress set aside $7.5 billion as a loan loss reserve.

And Fisker isn’t that risky. It’s attracted $650 million in private investment since the DOE loan went through. It’s got a car in production. It’s gearing up to produce another. (The Nina is by far the riskiest element of this, simply because it doesn’t exist yet, so no one knows if it will live up to its cost and range projections.) There is always the risk that gas prices will do one of their random plunges right when Fisker introduces its mass-market plug-in, but if that risk were going to scare investors away then there would never be an electric-vehicle market at all.

The administration is to be lauded for taking risks, not scolded. Let’s just hope the endless media scandalmongering doesn’t destroy political will to take chances.

4. Fisker investors are close with the Obama administration.

This is the tricky one. The fact is, the world of big-time cleantech investors is relatively small and the people who are part of it are more likely than the average bear to be Democrats. They believe in clean energy; they are experts in it and advocates for it; for obvious reasons, they raised money and voted for Obama. Many advised his campaign and some advise his administration.

It is therefore inevitable that if government supports cleantech, some of that support is going to go to companies run or funded by big Democratic players. This is part of what’s made it so easy for the media to cast a vague pall of suspicion over the loan programs.

ABC and iWatch did a story in March straining mightily to make hay out of this. But it’s worth reading that story closely. It lists a number of cleantech loan recipients with ties to the Democratic Party. But that’s all it does, in the end: list them. At no point does it establish that there was any improper political influence in the process of reviewing and granting loans. Of course it does the usual he-said she-said — Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns (Fla.) charges favoritism; the administration denies it — but at no point is there any actual evidence of favoritism. At all.

The best ABC and iWatch can come up with is that a rich donor named Steve Westly, a cleantech investor with money in a number of companies that received DOE loans, served briefly on a White House advisory council on clean energy. As a DOE spokeswoman said, “Attending two meetings of a non-binding public advisory panel hardly gave companies supported by Steve Westly a leg up — especially considering the board has no decisionmaking role, isn’t involved in making grants or loans, and never even discussed those companies.”

Anyway, a certain amount of suspicion and skepticism is inevitable and probably healthy. Crony capitalism is bad no matter who’s doing it. And I’m not going to lie: If it were the Bush administration and fossil-fuel investors involved, I’d be extremely suspicious.

But the Bush administration was routinely and openly corrupt; the Obama administration has been, despite all the recent atmospherics, remarkably corruption-free. Unless some actual evidence of collusion or impropriety emerges — and to date there has been none — there’s no reason to assume otherwise … unless you’re a media outlet hungry for clicks and ad revenue.

Anyway, as you can see, ABC and iWatch have managed quite a feat here, pumping up the impression of scandal with absolutely nothing to base it on. We probably shouldn’t be surprised. ABC’s Brian Ross is famous in the blogosphere for mangling an RFK Jr. quote to gin up controversy. And iWatch — a project of The Center for Public Integrity that seemed so promising when it launched — has produced a depressingly large amount of empty clickbait. (I give you this gem: “Limousine liberals? Number of government-owned limos has soared under Obama.” I mean really.) The headline for the Fisker story on the iWatch site right now is “Another Energy Boondoggle?”, which manages not only to inaccurately imply that Fisker is a boondoggle, but also to inaccurately call Solyndra a boondoggle!

There’s more involved here than Obama’s political fortunes. America desperately needs a forward-looking energy policy. It needs to be acting aggressively to support the cleantech industries that are going to dominate the 21st century. But that is simply going to be impossible if a vacuous, click-hungry press corps is going to gin up controversy out of every single investment. That’s what Politico and iWatch are doing: training politicians to play it safe, to be timid in the face of the country’s challenges.

The clicks aren’t worth it, y’all.

As news outlets hype the ABC News piece about Fisker Automotive, a company that received an Obama administration loan program while creating jobs both in Finland and Delaware, Republicans are likely to pounce as well. Already, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) appeared on Fox News to tout the Fisker story as part of a larger narrative about the failure of the Obama administration’s loan program. “On Solyndra, people are going to draw comparisons about [Fisker],” piped Fox News’ Bill Hemmer.Republicans exaggerated and misconstrued the controversy over Solyndra, a failed solar company that received a subsidized loan (originating from the Bush administration), to call to cutting all clean energy loan programs.

But before Republicans turn on the right-wing echo chamber to twist the Fisker story into some sort of case of wrongdoing, they should consider this ThinkProgress report about GOP lawmakers who have requested the same type of clean energy loans. According to the report, at least 62 requested green energy subsidies from the Obama administration. Both the Indiana and Louisina Republican delegations requested taxpayer money for energy efficient start-up car companies — using the same type of program obtained by Fisker Automotive:

– Reps. Todd Young (R), Larry Bucshon (R), Marlin Stutzman (R), Todd Rokita (R) and Dan Burton (R) signed a letter along with other Indiana lawmakers to Secretary Steven Chu requesting expedited action on a clean energy loan to Carbon Motors Corporation. The grant, the lawmakers claimed, would bring 1,500 jobs to Indiana while achieving “a positive impact on the environment.” View a copy of the Indiana letter supporting Carbon Motor’s Department of Energy grant request here. All five lawmakers voted ‘aye’ in a protest vote against Department of Energy clean energy grant programs.

– Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wrote two letters to Secretary Steven Chu asking for clean energy loans for a plant that would build electric cars. The letter, sent in June of 2009, claimed that the company could create 4,000 jobs. The Associated Press and Climate Progress have reported on the letters here.

– Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) sent a letter to Secretary Steven Chu requesting “expedited consideration” of a fuel efficiency loan grant for V-Vehicle Company to build a plant in his state. The entire Louisiana congressional delegation cosigned the June 2, 2010 letter, including clean energy critics Reps. Bill Cassidy (R), John Fleming (R), Steve Scalise (R), and Rodney Alexander (R). Vitter also sent letters recommending clean energy loan guarantees for Red River Environmental Products and Next Autoworks Company. View a copy of Vitter’s clean energy loan requests here. Fleming, Cassidy, Scalise, and Alexander voted “aye” in a protest vote against Department of Energy clean energy grant programs.

Read the rest of the report here.