*** A day of contradictions: Yesterday certainly felt a day of contradictions for the White House and the Obama campaign. First, on the same day the campaign unloaded on Mitt Romney and his work at Bain Capital, you saw the president attending a fundraiser hosted by the president of the hedge fund giant Blackstone Group. Then, as the White House has been doing everything it can to portray the president’s gay-marriage announcement as anything BUT political, there was Obama raising money at a LGBT fundraiser hosted by Ricky Martin. Not surprisingly, the latest New York Times/CBS poll (whose methodology were a tad circumspect of… more in a few) finds that a resounding 67% of respondents believe the announcement was made for mostly political reasons, versus 24% who believe it was done out of principle. “The results reinforce the concerns of White House aides and Democratic strategists who worried that the sequence of events leading up to the announcement last week made it look calculated rather than principled,” the New York Times writes. That’s why, we guess, Vice President Biden apologized to the president -- his comments on “Meet the Press” guaranteed the gay-marriage story would be more about process and politics and not conviction.

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