There’s no shortage of commentary and analysis about the repeal of DADT, so I’ll just add a brief thought.
A number of people showed amazing, active leadership to get this done. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Murphy in the House, Dan Choi and all the folks at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen; even Lady Gaga deserves a tip of the hat.
But I want to say a word for a different kind of leadership, the kind that takes place out of the limelight. Barack Obama, in particular, gave us several measured and tailored statements of support, none of them exhibiting the kind of inspiring rhetoric that will live on in the history of political oratory. He has taken no end of criticism for failing to live up to his self-description as our “fierce advocate.”
But as the Rolling Stones observed, you may not always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. What we should have learned from Bill Clinton’s spectacular failure on this issue is that a large component of vitriolic unfairness is built into it, and can and will be exploited easily enough. When Clinton promised he would resolve the problem of gays in the military with the stroke of a pen, he gave Sam Nunn an engraved invitation to visit those infamous submarine bunks, and paved the way for Republicans to invoke the most fearsome set of showers since World War II.
This is the kind of political problem that can best be solved more indirectly. There was no doubt about the public support for repeal, and while there was concern about how the troops would view it, that turned out to be based on the same wishful thinking by the right as everything else in the area of gay equality. But even in the face of genuine popular support, the equally genuine, gut-level ugliness of the minority also has to be negotiated.
That is Obama’s real triumph, and he proved to be quite right about how you approach the problem. Rather than offer up the moral leadership of the presidency as a target, and risk yet another failure, he allowed the focus of the animosity to diffuse, letting the political poison seep out in less toxic doses.
That’s not the kind of celebrity leadership that makes a president a short-term hero to a constituency group, and leaves nothing but moral victories in its wake – if a president is lucky enough to get even one of those. It’s a brand of political leadership that is antithetical to our desire for immediate gratification, but is better for our long-term health. Andrew Sullivan has called this Obama’s Long Game, and that gets it exactly right.
Harry Reid was complicit in this strategy to get us what we needed, not merely what we wanted. Reid doesn’t have the oratorical gifts Obama has, but he doesn’t need them. There are times when I wish Reid could give a speech with the conviction that Newt Gingrich had. But Reid’s low blood-pressure style is what allows him to get the results that Gingrich could only promise in his failed House leadership.
There are a lot of different styles of politics, and despite what the media and the spokespeople would like us to believe, there is an enormous amount of politics that takes place quietly, thoughtfully and without fanfare, until the fanfare is actually warranted. That is how the embarrassment of DADT was ultimately removed from the law.
May its slander rest in peace.