Bill Clinton on DOMA and DADT

Bill Clinton is at Netroots Nation, the progressive activist conference. Good for him! I bet he's having a blast. Someone asked him about DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act, anti-gay marriage legislation he signed) and DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell, the gays-in-the-military policy implemented at the beginning of his first term).

Clinton explained the politics that were going on at the time around gay rights issues, and it confirms what I have suspected, not only on this issue, but others as well: if Clinton did not advance a progressive agenda as much as some liberals would have liked (like, say, Ralph Nader), that was largely because he had to deal with a Republican Congress. If Clinton didn't make liberals happy, they should have been thankful that he was a firewall against much worse legislation being passed.

On DOMA, he makes a point I was not aware of: there was a real danger that Congress - both houses of which were, at the time, controlled by Republicans - was going to send a constitutional amendment to the states banning gay marriage. DOMA may be bad, but a constitutional amendment would have been infinitely worse, because it would have made gay marriage impossible in any state. So on gay marriage, Clinton may look like a bad guy for signing DOMA, but he was just making the best of a bad situation. Because if the Congress had sent that amendment to the states, it would have passed very quickly.

Obama and gay rights: Stonewall edition

Frank Rich wrote about gay rights and Obama yesterday, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He confessed that he didn't hear anything about Stonewall when it happened, despite his personal interest in civil rights. I don't blame him; I don't think I heard about Stonewall at the very least until I was in college. Rich is frustrated with Obama's lack of action on gay rights, as many liberals are. He comes up with a couple of explanations, and favors this one:

But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White House alumni with painful memories, doesn’t want to risk gay issues upending his presidency, as they did his predecessor’s in 1993.

Undoubtedly. But I cannot figure out why Rich doesn't go just a little deeper, and look into the Congressional politics. It's really quite simple. There are a number of Democratic senators and representatives, primarily from the South, who absolutely do not want to vote on any gay issues this year. Claire McCaskill from Missouri, Kay Hagan from North Carolina, and Mark Warner from Virginia are probably in this group. I haven't checked out their positions on gay rights, but I would be very surprised if they are pushing for the repeal of either DOMA or DADT. For Obama to push for the repeal of DOMA right now would be a gift to certain Republicans, to say nothing of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. For some of those senators and congresspeople, voting for an expasion of gay rights, particularly gay marriage, might cost them enough votes to lose them an election. That's a very high price.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Obama is being very careful on the repeal of DOMA and DADT because he doesn't want to lose. If he pushes for a repeal of either, and it fails, there will not be another opportunity for at least five years.

Andrew Sullivan is, of course, passionate about this, but I also think he's a little blinded by his own passion. A couple of weeks ago, more frustrated than usual, he wrote

Of course these things can be done. If anyone high up in the Obama administration or the Pelosi-Reid Congress gave a damn, much would have been done.

No, they can't. There is still much work to be done, and there are still many people who are adamantly opposed to gay marriage. There has been amazing progress on gay rights just this year, but let's not forget that Prop. 8 passed in California last year. And it didn't just pass in California: it passed in Los Angeles County, one of the most liberal counties in the country.

Sullivan has a list of things that he thinks supporters of gay rights should do to pressure Obama and the Democrats. I think a much more fruitful approach would be to compile a list of minor things that Obama can do to support gay rights - a checklist, if you will, and then demand action on each of those. Many of them will not require Congressional action. Obama is already working through some of those, and they require a lot of work in the bureaucracy. There are two rationales for this approach. First, it gets a lot of things done. Second, it will lay the ground work for the more dramatic action of repealing DOMA and DADT by showing that gay rights can be expanded, and the politicians supporting such expansion can survive.

Obama and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - the go-slow policy

President Obama hasn't done much on the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Many liberals, and at least one conservative, are getting a little antsy. Andrew Sullivan is impatient.

My fear in this as with the economy is that Obama likes to tear band-aids off very, very slowly.

Matt Yglesias is particularly frustrated:

[U]ltimately delay does no one any favors. The change will have to come sooner or later. In political terms, the White House may as well act decisively, take whatever hits they're going to take, and be done with it rather than letting this fester like a sore. And substantively, if the military is going to have to adjust they may as well do it sooner rather than later rather than lose more valuable personnel.

That's an eloquent articulation of a simplistic idea. It's also an example of what I call the "magic wand" theory of political action. This can be done today, so why aren't we?

Yglesias realizes that lack of adequate planning is part of what got Clinton in trouble over this issue:

Obama's decision on a variety of fronts has been guided by a clear desire to avoid some of the early missteps made by Bill Clinton. And conventional accounts of Clinton’s early presidency put the way he got into an early dispute with the military brass over treatment of gay and lesbian servicemembers high on the list of missteps to be avoided.

Again, an eloquent articulation of a simplistic idea. Clinton's mistake was that he picked a fight with the military. Really not a good idea for a guy who was basically a draft dodger.

But Clinton's situation was a little more complicated than that, as is Obama's. It wasn't that Clinton picked a fight with the military; it was that both he and the gay community were totally unprepared for the fight. Allowing gays in the military wasn't a high priority of the gay community at the time; they were much more worried about other issues, particularly AIDS. Clinton had not laid any groundwork politically for allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military. When the backlash came, Clinton and his gay and liberal allies were quickly overwhelmed. The result was that we ended up with a bad policy that institutionalized discrimination.

For Clinton, gays in the military became a flashpoint, something for his enemies to focus on. It wasn't just that Clinton wasn't prepared for the fight; he had no idea there was going to be a fight at all.

That is exactly what Obama wants to avoid. Right now gay rights are a very, very touchy subject with a lot of people. The problem is not that they are angry. The problem is that they have nowhere to focus their anger. There are a lot of people in places like North Dakota who are willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but who are also queasy with everything they are hearing about gay marriage. But there's nothing they can do about something happening in New Hampshire. If Obama takes a strong stand on DADT, or any gay issue, all of that anger is going to focus on him.

Clinton's first year in office was actually quite successful, but the gays in the military issue had a ridiculously outsized impact, coming, as it did, very early in his presidency. It threw him off his stride, and let his enemies gain some traction. And then the Democrats lost the House in 1994.

The political calculus for Obama is very straightforward. Eliminating DADT is the right thing to do. But timing in politics is crucial. Obama has a huge number of things on his plate. He doesn't want to risk support for his broader agenda on an issue that, let's face it, affects a few thousand people. Is that cold and calculating? Yes, it is. But guess what - it's also good politics.

The timing is also poor because we are fighting two wars. Obama's military priority right now is winning those wars, or at least getting us out of there. Once he does that, once he has credibility as a military leader, he will have more clout with the military.

Matt Yglesias makes one very problematic assumption: he assumes that Obama will win this issue. Obama cannot make that assumption.

Obama is being very careful with DADT because there is a very real possibility that he will not be successful. Obama is doing the exact opposite of Clinton for one very good reason: Clinton failed.