“I am vice president of the United States of America,” Biden replied. “The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction– beyond that.”

There is a distinction between civil unions and gay marriage, of course, and the transcript of the Biden interview doesn’t make it clear if he distinguishing between the two or blurring those lines…

Indeed, almost instantaneously, the Obama campaign was trying to slice a fine line on the vice president’s remark, declaring them no further along the evolutionary spectrum than where the president currently stands: “What VP said — that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights — is precisely POTUS’s position,” tweeted David Axelrod, Obama’s top political adviser.