"If we consider this to be a civil right, and I do, I don’t think civil rights ought to be left up to a state-by-state approach."

"I think we should have a national policy on this."

Here comes the pull from the left on same-sex marriage. That's James Clyburn, who ranks 3rd among Democrats in the House.

Marriage is actually unusually hard to handle at the state level — which was why Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. If any state permits same-sex marriage, couples who want to marry can travel to that state. Are you going to allow individual states to decide whether to recognize that marriage? DOMA was a decision to say yes, but Obama has said he believes DOMA to be unconstitutional, and he withdrew from defending it in court. Presumably, in appointing federal judges, he hopes to find individuals who share that legal opinion. And the federal government uses marriage status for many purposes. It must either accept the same-sex marriages from the states or not.

So the federalism solution really doesn't work. I know I said — just this morning — that "Leave it to the states is a fine — truly excellent — way to package the issue and set it to the side." It's not as though I'm not aware of the legal problem. I teach the topic in law school classes frequently. It's only that I think the issue can be politically packaged that way. But I must acknowledge that a truly probing questioner would succeed in opening that package back up, and Clyburn is encouraging that inquiry.

"The Obama White House is too white"... so it keeps "tripping over race rather than inspiring on race."

Says Maureen Dowd:

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong....

The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. 

(Gays! Where did that come from?)

His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official....

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” [Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina,] told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Dowd ends by recommending that Obama hire Shirley Sherrod for a newly created position called "Director of Black Outreach."

"I can tell you right now, if we don't pass this bill, I don't care who you are; if you have a D behind your name and this bill has not been passed, you are in tremendous peril next year."

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn sounds the alarm, but perhaps not the alarm he thinks he's sounding. It focuses the minds in the House, but does it incline them to vote for the bill or against it?