JIM GERAGHTY: An Obama Insider’s Lament.

“I was forced to ask myself, would he really have used religious language to convince voters of something he did not believe?” Wear writes. “If the president did believe in and support same-sex marriage in 2007 or even earlier, his repeated assertions that he did not were a direct rebuke to the type of politics he said was possible. To let stand the claim that he supported gay marriage all along is to choose political gain over the integrity of the president’s own words.”

Rarely will you hear a participant in a winning presidential campaign describe the victorious effort so scathingly. Wear cringes at Democratic National Convention speakers “almost comically excited about abortion.” The cynicism of the endeavor grates on him. “Data-driven politics is incompatible with an aspirational politics. It is willing to sacrifice a broader coalition for a few bucks, a dozen hours of free airtime and an angrier base.” He’s clearly uncomfortable with the effort to paint Republican opponents into extreme, theocratic monsters: “Too often the White House would not seek to marginalize the most offensive voices but to prop them up. . . . One former aide to Obama summarized the 2012 campaign’s ‘basic message’ to voters was that ‘Mitt Romney hates you.’”

Community agitators gotta agitate, I suppose, but the far worse offense was our Fourth Estate’s willing complicity.