May 10, 2012
At her weekly press conference with reporters on Thursday, Pelosi was asked whether fundraising may have affected the president’s decision to endorse homosexual "marriage," and if she had spoken to friends, donors and “bundlers” who now are more enthusiastic for Obama because of his apparent “evolution” on the issue.
“As I said to you before, this is a statement the president made, I think everybody can say we didn’t know it was coming, right?” Pelosi said. “And it had to do about with who he is, what he stands for, what he believes, what he thinks is right for America, our families, our values and our faith in the future.”
“Anything about the politics is incidental,” she said. “I don’t think that this is political at all.”
Pelosi continued: “But I will say this, we’re hoping to have many more Republicans join the bandwagon. I think what the president did -- whatever the timing and the rest -- was an attempt to unify and not divide.”
“And our statement from the (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) DCCC and from me had nothing to do with money,” she said. “Nothing to do with money.”
An unidentified reporter then asked, “And yet I wonder if your friends who are involved in politics, fundraising, donors, bundlers have expressed to you, up until yesterday—”
“I’m not big in the bundler crowd,” Pelosi said. “No, we have people who are idealistic about wanting the future to be better for our country, many of them would have liked single-payer, public option, things like that, so there’s always a conversation about what other things we could do and how far we can go.”
“But I really dismiss the idea that this had anything to do with money,” she said. “I really do.”
In the first 90 minutes after the president’s interview with ABC was released on Wednesday, Obama’s reelection campaign received $1 million in contributions, according to news reports.
Campaign “bundlers” are people who gather contributions from many individuals and present the sum (the “bundle”) to the campaign.
According to reports in the Washington Post, Obama’s alleged change on "gay marriage" came as leading homosexual and liberal donors were threatening to withhold donations from Obama’s Super PAC—Priorities USA—over his “increasingly convoluted position on gay rights and same-sex marriage.”
The minority leader began her remarks by saying, “Yesterday was quite historic,” and praised the president’s support for homosexual "marriage" as speaking to the “values of our families, faith and country.”
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