Tag Archives: obama

Obama and DOMA

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Matt has been bugging me to write something about the Obama administration’s decision to stop defending DOMA in court.

I just don’t consider it as big a deal as some other people seem to, for a few reasons.

One, contrary to what Newt Gingrich says, the administration is not suspending enforcement of the law. The law is still in place.

Two, we’re not talking about all of DOMA. We’re talking only about Section 3. If Section 3 is declared unconstitutional, the federal government has to recognize same-sex marriages performed in any state that allows them, but it doesn’t do anything about states that don’t allow them. Okay, that’s still a big step. But it’s not everything.

Three, the House can still step in to file a brief defending DOMA in court, and even if it doesn’t, independent organizations can always file amicus briefs putting forth their positions on the matter, and the court can take heed.

The ultimate decision-maker on this issue — barring DOMA repeal by Congress, which won’t happen anytime soon — will be the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court will do what the Supreme Court will do, no matter what any lawyer argues. It’s become a judicial cliché that Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the only one that matters, but in this case it’s true. Although Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor and Kagan were not on the Court the last time it decided a major gay rights case — Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 — we can be pretty sure where they’ll line up. Kennedy’s the wild card.

Yet in an intangible way, the administration’s decision is important. Obama is using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make a statement in favor of gay rights, and any time the topic is raised for debate, more people become convinced of the arguments in favor of equality.

It’s just a matter of time.

Obama the Rationalizer

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You could see Obama furiously spinning the tax cut deal in his press conference yesterday: it’s a necessary compromise! This country is built on compromise!

I’m getting tired of Obama always telling us he deserves points for compromise, as if compromise were the only option. Of course compromise is the only option if you never fight for anything in the first place. It’s one thing to compromise after you’ve been negotiating with someone for a long time; it’s another thing to signal before you even begin negotiating that you’re willing to compromise with an opposition who is not willing to do the same.

What did the country get out of this? What did Republicans give up? The Republicans gave in on unemployment benefits, which they would eventually have conceded anyway. It was just a bargaining position. They know how to negotiate; the Obama White House does not.

I am so tired of this.

Obama thinks he’s such a masterful leader. But he’s not. True leaders think creatively. They look at the chessboard and say, how can I rearrange all these pieces to achieve my goals? If they don’t like the chessboard, they create a new one. They make up new rules and get other people to agree to them. Obama should be on prime-time TV every night, telling the American people why the Republicans are wrong and he is right. The Republicans want to block unemployment benefits? Fine — Obama should go on TV and say, Look at what the Republicans are doing, and all because they refuse to make rich people pay the same tax rates they paid during the Clinton era. They claim they’re concerned about the deficit and yet they have no way to pay the $900 billion cost of these continued tax cuts.

Obama doesn’t do any of that. He’s completely passive. He never even tries to fight. Over and over again, the Democrats let Republicans frame the debate, even on issues where the Democrats have the more popular position. And over and over again, the White House negotiates against itself.

This White House is pathologically afraid of political combat. It’s so afraid of poisoning the political well, when actually, nobody cares about the damn political well. People don’t care about political discourse; they just want results. You can turn off the TV or close the newspaper, but you can’t turn off your economic situation.

Obama just cares about things that most people don’t really care about. He needs to come back down here to Earth where the rest of us are.

The Relevant President

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Quiz:

After the 1994 midterm elections that wiped out Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and gave us House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Clinton was reduced to pleading pathetically to the media that he, as president, was still relevant to the political conversation.

How long after the 1994 midterm elections did this happen?

(a) November 1994, a few days after the election.

(b) January 1995, shortly after the Republicans took formal control of Congress.

(c) Not until April 1995.

Answer: (c). It was not until the evening of April 18, 1995 — more than five months after the election — that President Clinton said the following in a prime-time press conference — a conference that two of the major news networks declined to cover:

The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The record we have built up over the last 2 years and the things we’re trying to do to implement it give it relevance. The President is relevant here, especially an activist President. And the fact that I am willing to work with the Republicans. The question is, are they willing to work with me?

Rhetorically, it was seen as one of the low points of his presidency — having to appeal to the Constitution for his relevance — even though it contained the seeds of his return to public favor.

What’s the point? The point is, give Obama time. Clinton floundered for months after the Republicans took over. He let them overplay their hand. It wasn’t really until a year after the midterms — the government shutdown of late 1995 — that Clinton really got his mojo back.

(Of course, the government shutdown also enabled him to meet a young intern named Monica Lewinsky, so it wasn’t a total plus.)

Incidentally, guess what happened the day after that infamous press conference? The Oklahoma City bombing. Tragic as that event was, it allowed Clinton to play a role the public likes to see in its presidents: chief comforter and expounder of the nation’s grief.

Now, history never repeats itself exactly. Despite what Mitch McConnell seems to think, he is still going to be the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, which will deprive Obama of a foil that Clinton had in Majority Leader Bob Dole. It’s not clear whether the economy will come back in the next two years, it’s not clear whether Obama has the political acumen of Bill Clinton, and it’s not clear whether John Boehner will overplay his hand like Newt Gingrich did. We’ll see.

This week’s election results give me hope, in a way, because they point the way to Obama’s re-election. He’s not automatically going to get re-elected; several different things will have to go right.

But there’s certainly a very good chance of it.