This had nothing to do with changing. He got shoved into a corner by the wingnuts. It was realpolitik, and he acknowledges what a fuckup it was (see very interesting article, below).
I worked under the hot-breathed supervision of the White House when we thought the prohibition against gays serving in the military was going out the window--ten hour days, seven days a week. No one was more disappointed than our WH overlords when that effort crumbled. They WANTED it to happen....sometimes, though, the political opposition is able to exert more pressure and get their way. That is what happened in that instance.
Contrast that with the "guidance" we were getting from the legislators on the HASC and SASC, which was, in essence "Don't waste your time, this isn't going anywhere." They were hostile to those of us making a good faith effort to get all the boxes checked in preparation for lifting the restrictions. They were telling us from the beginning to not bother, to forget about it. Of course, we weren't going to take anyone's word for anything--we acted under the assumption that the restriction was going to be lifted, and there was a shitload of stuff to fix/change/eliminate for that to happen. We had to go over every damn instruction/notice/directive and propose the needed changes. All that stuff got tossed in boxes when the (cough) "compromise" of DADT was agreed to.
Elections do matter.
With DOMA, Clinton wasn't happy at all--he didn't change, he just got bigfooted by the wingnuts, and the discriminatory "American people" -- many of whom didn't have his back.
Why Bill Clinton Signed the Defense of Marriage Act
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-bill-clinton-signed-the-defense-of-marriage-act
It is extremely rare for former Presidents to admit mistakes made in office, and rarer still for one to disavow a major piece of legislation. That’s partly why Bill Clinton’s op-ed in the Washington Post calling the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—a law that he signed—“incompatible with our Constitution,” and asking the Supreme Court to overturn it, is so important.
The essay, a Clinton associate told me, was Clinton’s own idea; he wrote it out himself in longhand on a legal pad. As his former White House adviser on gay-rights, I was not surprised by the message. But Clinton’s willingness, just twenty days before two gay-rights cases go to the Supreme Court, to publicly call DOMA discriminatory is a big step, even if his comments stopped short of the full apology some have asked for.
But the op-ed leaves a political mystery intact. Clinton, though clearly unhappy with the law today, does not really explain why he signed it, other than to say “it was a very different time.” Perhaps that is explanation enough. Still, how was it that Bill Clinton, the first President to champion gay rights, put his name on one of the most discriminatory anti-gay statutes in American history?
The simple answer is that he got boxed in by his political opponents, and that his campaign positions on gay rights ran ahead of public opinion. But there was another important factor: a failure to imagine how quickly gay rights would evolve, and how difficult it would be to undo the damage that DOMA did. ....Was it realistic to think that a Presidential veto of DOMA would have put Clinton’s reëlection in jeopardy? At the time I thought not. But in 1996 less than thirty per cent of Americans supported gay marriage, and even eight years after that, in 2004, President George W. Bush used gay marriage extremely effectively as a wedge issue against John Kerry, who at the time only supported civil unions. In fact, many believe that it was the Bush campaign’s very strategic placement of anti-gay-marriage state constitutional ballot initiatives throughout moderate and conservative leaning states (like Ohio) which brought out conservative Bush voters and carried the day for him in that election. Could similar tactics have been used with the same effectiveness in 1996? Obviously, we will never know.
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Sara Lang ?@SaraLang
http://theobamadiary.com/2015/06/26/tweets-of-the-day-30/
