Good point on the DADT, is there any reading on the subject you'd recommend? I was unaware, sounds a bit like "after the fact" point-scoring on Team D.
Yeah, it was pretty much part of the lame duck Democratic Congress cramming through everything they could in the last two months of 2010.
Oddly, I can't find a thread where we're actually talking about it passing (I can find in the LGBT thread where we talk about it being filibustered and where we talk about it going into effect, but not the part where it actually passed).
At the beginning of the
Me Gridlock thread back in late 2010 I linked to a Washington Post article called
In political gamble, Reid seeks votes that are sure to fail; that's pretty much what was happening in December of '010. The Dems, knowing they were a month away from losing their House majority and several of their Senate seats, started pushing whatever the fuck pet legislation they could possibly think of; the DADT repeal, surprisingly, actually managed to pass.
And fortunate thing I didn't credit it as being awesome, then.
No, but you implied that it counterbalanced all the actual, concrete stuff he's done to undermine civil rights.
I guess my view is a bit old-fashioned, where somebody suggesting that Gay Marriage could exist at all might cause their political career to spontaneously combust. But a bit of social acceptance, or even letting the issue exist is, as I said, Nice.
It's nice, but as much as anything it's a sign of the times: we now live in a reality where a Democratic President believes that offering tepid support of gay marriage will earn him more votes than it costs him. Obama's not taking a bold stand here, he's holding his finger in the wind. (There was a rather fun segment on Daily Show a few months back about how in just a few years Fox News's rhetoric on the subject has shifted from "It will mean men fucking turtles and the end of civilization" to "Oh, Obama's only supporting gay marriage because it's such a popular position.")
Taking a bold stand would entail actually fucking trying to do something about it instead of pulling this "states' rights" horseshit.
Seriously, think about it for a minute. A guy whose parents were a BIRACIAL COUPLE is espousing the stance that states should determine marriage rights for themselves.
Doesn't sound so goddamn bold to me; sounds downright craven under the circumstances.
There's a lot of backroom workings, a lot of currying favor and gathering votes, involved in something like the DADT repeal. Just because the work doesn't happen in front of a microphone and a camera doesn't mean Obama wasn't doing a lot to get that repeal through.
I don't typically take a total lack of evidence as evidence, though.
Did Obama extend the Bush Tax Cuts in exchange for repealing DADT? That would certainly imply he was a much shrewder negotiator than, well, any actual evidence I've ever seen of his negotiation skills. But at this point I'm a lot more inclined to believe the Democrats are Occasionally Lucky than Secretly Competent.