Axelrod: Obama Misled Voters on Gay Marriage

A longtime adviser says President Barack Obama deceived American voters for years by claiming he opposed same-sex marriage.

Former Obama strategist David Axelrod says in a new book that Obama actually supported gay marriage all along.

He says Obama pretended to oppose it because of fears that black Christian leaders would oppose him if his true beliefs became public.

Meanwhile, the president is pushing back, telling BuzzFeed News that Axelrod has it wrong.

"I think David is mixing up my personal feelings with my position on the issue," the president said.

But Axelrod's disclosure affirmed what was widely suspected for years.

Obama had indicated his support for gay marriage in a 1996 questionnaire before backtracking years later.

Then in 2011, Obama and the White House started saying his position on marriage was "evolving."

"If Obama's views were 'evolving' publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors," Axelrod writes in his book.

Then in 2012, Vice President Joe Biden declared that Obama supported gay marriage, upping the pressure on the president to make his views clear ahead of the election.

So, in May of that year, Obama came out and announced that his support for same-sex marriage.

Obama admitted to BuzzFeed, "I always felt that same-sex couples should be able to enjoy the same rights, legally, as anybody else and so it was frustrating to me not to, I think, be able to square that with what were a whole bunch of religious sensitivities out there."

Many believed he had been holding off on a public embrace of gay marriage for fear it could damage his re-election prospects in 2012.

And Axelrod confirms Obama's advisers told him it could cost him a few key states, including North Carolina.