JOE BIDEN WAS BEAMING. HE WAS STANDING AT THE PODIUM ON a stage in a crowded auditorium in the Department of the Interior.
“It’s a real good day,” the vice president exclaimed, and a crowd of several hundred people cheered.
In the audience were cabinet members, senators and representatives, and scores of gay rights activists. Three days before Christmas, they had come to witness a historic event—and the fulfillment of Obama’s high-profile campaign promise to repeal the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy banning out-in-the-open gays and lesbians from serving in the military.
On the stage with Biden were the two senators who had sponsored the legislation to end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell: Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat-turned-independent, much loathed by liberals for many reasons (including his hawkishness and his support for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign), and Susan Collins, the moderate Republican from Maine. Next to them stood House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Other honored guests on the stage included Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Though the mood in the room was celebratory, it was also a bittersweet event. That night, Congress would adjourn for the year. The Democrats’ four-year-long control of the House was coming to an end; Pelosi was serving in her final hours as speaker.
When Obama walked on the stage, he gave Biden a quick hug.
“Yes, we did!” the crowd chanted.
The president smiled at the assembled and said, “Yes, we did.”
He told the story of Andy Lee, a gay GI, who during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, scaled down the slope of an icy ravine—“with shells landing around him, amid smoke and chaos and the screams of wounded men”—to save a fellow soldier. The president quoted a special operations warfighter: “We have a gay guy in the unit. He’s big, he’s mean. He kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.”
Then the president strode to a desk on the stage, sat down, and signed his name to the law. Obama slapped his hand on the document, looked at the audience, and said, “This is done.”
Signing the measure was one of the last acts of Obama’s first two years in office. In two weeks’ time, he would be facing a House controlled by Republicans beholden to the intransigent Tea Party wing of their party and a Senate with an enlarged Republican caucus. But for the moment, he and the others could exult in a pure victory—a success that had the hallmarks of an Obama accomplishment: patience, deliberation, determination, luck, tension, and nuanced behind-the-scenes deal cutting.
ABOUT A YEAR EARLIER, OBAMA CALLED JIM MESSINA, HIS deputy chief of staff, into the Oval Office.
“You’re doing Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell,” the president said.
“Why me?” Messina asked.
“Because I want to win.”
By this point in the presidency, Messina had earned a nickname he fully embraced: Obama’s fixer. The fortysomething rail-thin Capitol Hill veteran had been brought into the 2008 campaign by David Plouffe to serve as chief of staff, with the task of coordinating the massive political, field, and policy operations.
Prior to that, much of Messina’s career had been devoted to Senator Max Baucus, as either chief of staff or campaign manager for the Montana centrist. Messina quickly became an integral member of Obama’s inner circle. In the White House, Messina, an aggressive but low-profile fellow (who drove a Porsche), worked well with the hard-charging and profane chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Messina once referred to Emanuel as the “smartest political strategist of his generation.” And he readily acknowledged his own outsized ego.
“I personally couldn’t tell you what he believes in,” said one Obama campaign staffer who collaborated with Messina. “But he does reflect one distinguishing Obama quality: pragmatism.”
In the White House, Messina became known as the guy who could take care of the president’s problems. A cabinet nominee with a tax problem? Messina smoothed it over in the Senate. Tracking how various agencies would spend stimulus dollars? Messina was on it. He was the White House’s equivalent of the Wolf, the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction. One Messina associate noted that he once explained his effectiveness this way: “If the White House deputy chief of staff calls you, you take the fucking phone call.”
Messina was all over the health care bill—cajoling the Senate and handling the progressive outfits and unions that were pushing for reform that went beyond the pending legislation. He helped concoct the administration’s controversial deal with the pharmaceutical industry: in return for the industry promoting health care reform and promising $80 billion in unspecified cost savings over ten years, the White House agreed to walk away from two prominent Obama campaign promises (using the purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and facilitating the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe). Progressives decried the deal as a giveaway (or bribe) to Big Pharma; the White House saw it as a savvy move that neutralized a potential foe of health care reform.
Messina was also the White House’s point man in regularly dealing with left-of-center constituency groups—liberal advocacy shops, unions, abortion rights groups, environmental organizations, and gay rights groups. Many Tuesday nights, Messina met with officials of these outfits at a Washington hotel, through what was called the Common Purpose Project, and discussed White House plans, priorities, and messages. Some of the outside participants considered the meetings merely sessions where the White House tossed out talking points and marching orders—which were ignored by the outside groups at their own peril. As some advocates saw it, if you didn’t play ball the way Messina wanted, you’d be cut off.
OBAMA HAD RUN FOR PRESIDENT AS A CHAMPION OF GAY RIGHTS (with the notable exception of gay marriage), and in his first White House meeting with Gates, Mullen, and the chiefs of the military, the new president notified them that he intended to keep his campaign vow to end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
The military men might have wondered if the fresh president was merely talking the talk. Sixteen years earlier, another new-to-the-office and young commander in chief with no prior military experience had kicked off his presidency contending that he would implement his campaign pledge to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed services. And it turned into a mess for Bill Clinton.
Not only did Clinton fail to lift this ban, but his bumbled efforts also prompted the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1993 to pass legislation enshrining Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell into law—prohibiting the military from questioning service members about their sexual orientation but allowing it to toss out soldiers who publicly indicated they were gay. More than twelve thousand members of the armed services would be forced out in the years that followed.
With this back story, Pentagon officials had cause to suspect Obama might not be eager to shove the Pentagon toward social change. But there was another reason for the military brass to believe that this campaign promise would be sidelined: the new president needed the military. He had two wars to wage. He was committed to withdrawing US troops from Iraq to end that war. He had pledged to revise the strategy guiding the US military effort in Afghanistan, hoping to achieve tangible progress in what increasingly seemed to be a morass.
Obama, a liberal president who had not spent much time during his short political career on military matters, had to establish a sound working relationship with the Pentagon in order to achieve his top national security priorities. Starting with an in-your-face initiative would likely not yield a productive partnership.
Before even moving into the White House, Obama had concluded that he could not win a fight over Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell without the Pentagon on his side. In the House and Senate, he would need the votes of centrist Democrats (and perhaps a few Republicans) who were close to the military. If the Pentagon were to openly (or privately) resist, the president figured, he would not be able to corral these votes.
As commander in chief, Obama could cut orders that would eviscerate Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. He could instruct the Defense Department to halt or limit its enforcement. He could tell Justice Department attorneys not to defend the policy when challenged in court. “Many of his supporters believed that if he thought it was unfair, he should just get rid of it with a stroke of the pen,” Gibbs recalled. But if Obama chose any of these avenues, it would be a declaration of war against the Pentagon. And any policy change he implemented on his own could be undone by a subsequent administration. Obama desired a complete—“durable,” he often told aides—end to the ban. That meant he needed a law. That meant he needed Congress. And that meant he needed the Pentagon.
DURING THE FIRST YEAR, OBAMA DIDN’T CHARGE TOWARD repeal, but he was not letting the matter slide. As he ended one meeting with Gates and Mullen in the spring of 2009, he said, “You know I’m serious about repealing Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.”
He told them to start thinking about how to accomplish this. Jim Jones, a former Marine Corps general whom Obama had picked to be his national security adviser, was at this meeting. Afterward he cornered Greg Craig, Obama’s White House counsel, in the hallway to ask if Obama was serious about forcing the Pentagon to drop the ban.
“Weren’t you listening during the campaign?” Craig replied.
Not really, Jones said.
Throughout that year, Obama didn’t lean on Gates and Mullen. Certain leaders of the gay rights community were not surprised. They were aware of the history (the Clinton disaster) and understood the dynamic (Obama had to win over the Pentagon before changing it). They were willing to be patient. Obama had an economy to rescue, wars to manage. Other gay rights advocates, however, were angry that Obama was not moving aggressively on their issues—not on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, not on financing AIDS programs, not on legislation to prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. (Some were still upset that the president had tapped Rick Warren, the popular evangelical pastor who had compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.)
Toward the end of 2009, White House aides were thinking that the administration had to get moving soon on the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, if only to show that Obama would stand by his convictions—a matter that concerned Obama supporters beyond those focused on gay rights. After all, many did believe that as commander in chief Obama could reverse Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell with a snap of his fingers—an impression that led to the question: Well, why hasn’t he? (Months earlier, the administration had enraged gay rights supporters when Justice Department lawyers, defending against a challenge to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, filed a legal brief noting that gay marriage was akin to incest and threatened traditional heterosexual marriage. Eventually, Obama would order the department to stop defending the constitutionality of DOMA.)
But the White House wasn’t ready yet to move on this front. In November 2009, Joe Solmonese and David Smith, two officials of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights lobby, huddled with Messina. Their organization, they told him, was prepared to mount a major campaign to eliminate Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. “I need you guys to hold off,” Messina said, “until we finish the Afghanistan review.” At the time, the president was conducting an intensive assessment of policy in Afghanistan. Once that was done, Messina told them, Obama would kick into gear on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
TOWARD THE START OF 2010, IT WAS TIME FOR OBAMA TO FORGE a deal with Gates and Mullen. The White House assumed that Gates and Mullen were not eager to implement this big change—but not because of any strong personal feelings. When Gates had been CIA chief under the first President Bush, he had stopped the agency from investigating the sexual orientation of employees during security clearances. And Mullen, a sixty-three-year-old churchgoing Catholic, had grown up in liberal Hollywood, where his father had been an actor-turned-press-agent whose clients included Ann-Margret and Julie Andrews. He was raised in what was probably a tolerant environment.
But Gates and Mullen certainly weren’t looking for a politically charged task in the middle of two wars. Supporting repeal would place them in opposition to some of their best friends on Capitol Hill—defense hawks who did not favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, was fervently against repeal. In the Senate, John McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, was poised to lead the opposition, even though he had once signaled he was open to ending the ban.
The two military men, though, told Obama that they would support repeal—but they had a condition: they wanted to be in charge of how it would happen. Gates demanded nine months or so for the Pentagon to study how to handle a transition—and he requested no White House action on repeal until after the study was completed. That was the price for their cooperation.
Obama consented. Gates and Mullen would accept his policy of change, and he would let them control how the change occurred. The president had enlisted them as partners in this mission. In his State of the Union address on January 27, 2010, Obama declared he would “work with Congress and our military” in the coming year to end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
Obama had traded time for the support he deemed essential. But Democrats on the Hill were not so patient. Several Democratic senators and representatives were already planning on pursuing an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill—which sets overarching guidelines for military programs—that would eliminate the ban. Despite Obama’s agreement with Gates and Mullen, the White House was in danger of losing control of the process.
The day before Gates and Mullen were due to testify before Congress on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Messina convened in the White House a meeting of Washington’s leading gay rights advocates, including Solmonese and Smith. This is what’s going to happen, Messina told the advocates: Gates and Mullen will testify that they support repeal but that they don’t want legislation yet—not until they have had time to come up with a plan of their own. And it will take them about nine months to conduct a study—not on whether to repeal, but on how to repeal.
This is great, the advocates said. But they pointed out that if the White House were to wait that long for the Pentagon to finish its study, there would be no vote on repeal legislation until after the November congressional elections—and that was rather risky, given the widespread belief that the Republicans would win the House. Besides, the advocates added, legislation was already moving on the Hill, and the grassroots were fired up and ready to roll. Why wait?
The timing was not open to discussion, Messina said. He and the other White House aides sat there stone-faced, as it dawned on the advocates they were not being asked for their opinion; they were being told what had already been decided. This was not full consultation; Obama and his aides had already devised their game plan. This was notification.
MESSINA’S MESSAGE WAS NOT A SHOCK FOR THE ADVOCATES. Since the start of the administration, policy pushers and issue lobbyists had complained that the Obama crowd was not as collaborative as they had hoped. During the 2008 campaign, Obama and his advisers had routinely described their endeavor as a grassroots movement with ownership that extended far beyond the candidate and his political crew. That was true in a macro sense; never before had so many millions of voters plugged into a campaign through volunteering, donating, and social-media networking.
Yet when it came to operational control, David Plouffe had held the reins tight. More notable, he, Axelrod, and Obama had often eschewed—that is, fought off—advice from outside their small circle. “No organization can survive flitting from thing to thing, trying to please outside observers,” Plouffe wrote after the campaign.
Still, Obama and his advisers had believed the 2008 campaign belonged to their millions of supporters. They did not appear to feel the same about his presidency. The pressures of governing—particularly at a time of multiple crises—did inhibit authentic and extensive outreach that could be incorporated into decision making. But Obama and his aides had essentially placed his grassroots campaign army on hold, with the Obama for America volunteer powerhouse folded into the Democratic Party and renamed Organizing for America. Obama and his small group of advisers were the deciders. The president would mainly be working for his supporters, not with them.
THE GAY RIGHTS ADVOCATES LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH mixed feelings. It was a tremendous boost to have Gates and Mullen endorse repeal. But they feared Obama’s strategy—which could stretch out the process for a year and a half—would fail. And senators and representatives would be galloping ahead with repeal legislation that had a shot at success. Obama’s go-slow timetable seemed a formula for conflict and squabbling among all the players supporting repeal.
GATES AND MULLEN DID HOLD UP THEIR END OF THE BARGAIN. In a much-covered appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 2, 2010, they testified in favor of repeal.
It was a heartfelt moment for the military’s top officer. Mullen declared that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.” He added, “I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”
Gates appeared a bit less enthusiastic. “We have received our orders from the commander in chief, and we are moving out accordingly,” he testified. The defense secretary noted that it would take the Pentagon about a year to study how to implement a new policy.
This was a historic hearing—the top brass backing Obama’s call for repeal. But John McCain was not enjoying it.
In 2006, he had remarked on MSNBC’s Hardball, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.” Now he was steaming mad and ready to lead the opposition. (Though McCain’s need to survive a tough Republican primary battle in Arizona might have motivated his new hostility toward repeal, administration officials and Washington pundits couldn’t help but wonder if he was acting out his lingering resentment toward the man who kept him from the Oval Office.)
And not all Democrats were eager to dump Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Representative Steny Hoyer publicly said that he wanted Democrats in their home districts to focus on “jobs and fiscal responsibility,” not gays in the military. In private conversations with White House aides, Hoyer complained about the president forcing House Democrats to take what he thought would be a difficult vote.
THOUGH GATES SEEMED TO BE ON BOARD, WHITE HOUSE AIDES worried about him. He had served in Washington many years and certainly knew how to sabotage the administration’s repeal effort if he chose to do so. They wondered why the Pentagon needed so long to conduct the study. What would happen if the vote on the repeal were postponed to the next Congress? Messina had to remind his colleagues that if the Democrats lost the House and/or the Senate, there would be a lame-duck session. That could be their last chance.
“The gay rights community didn’t trust the Pentagon on all this,” a White House aide subsequently said. “They thought we were crazy.”
Gates was adamant that no legislation go forward until the Pentagon finished its study. In April, he and Mullen sent a letter to Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, warning Congress not to undo the ban until after the Pentagon study was completed—and the due date was December 1. That caused more worry for gay rights activists. After that date, there likely wouldn’t be enough time to consider last-minute repeal legislation. They wondered if the Pentagon was trying to kill repeal with this schedule. And if this whole matter got kicked into the next year—and the Republicans were then controlling the House—repeal would likely be dead.
As a bill that would end the ban (after the president and the Pentagon certified that the armed forces would not be disrupted) approached a vote that spring, Obama did not take a public position on it. Some gay activists thought the president, who had vowed to be a gay rights champion, was wimping out at a crucial time. Yet behind the scenes, Messina and the White House were urging Democrats to support the measure. It was a delicate juggling act for the White House: support repeal without openly championing the bill (to avoid irritating Gates), but on the sly advising the bill’s backers.
Messina had recruited Joseph Lieberman to be the main cosponsor of this amendment (with Susan Collins). Lieberman had long supported ending the ban on openly gay and lesbian service members. But he was not eager to be the point man without assurances that the White House was serious. He was not interested in a lonely crusade, and there was plenty of cause for Lieberman and the president to be wary of each other. Could Obama trust Lieberman to go to the mat, even if it meant fighting his dear friends McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham? Could Lieberman trust the president to have his back all the way? Messina persuaded Lieberman of the president’s support, and the independent scorned by Democrats charged ahead.
Meanwhile, McCain was waging a war on repeal, circulating letters from the chiefs of the navy, army, air force, and marines that called for Congress to hold off on any legislation before the study came out. (Earlier in the year, Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway, who opposed repeal, had declared, “I would not ask our Marines to live with someone who is homosexual if we can possibly avoid it.”)
Even so, the measure passed the Senate Armed Services Committee at the end of May on a 16–12, mostly party-line vote. Hours later, the House approved its version of the measure on a 234–194 vote. “We wanted to tell people what we were doing to pass the bill,” one White House aide said. “We wanted to take credit. But we had to play the cards the right way.”
Then momentum stalled. The Senate bill containing the repeal provision bogged down due to other issues, and in September, Reid and the Senate Democrats couldn’t get the defense bill past yet another GOP filibuster.
White House aides fretted about running out of time on Capitol Hill. On several occasions, Pentagon officials mentioned to White House aides that the Defense Department might not meet the December 1 deadline for the report. “That’s when we became unglued,” a senior White House official later said.
BUT IN SEPTEMBER, OBAMA CAUGHT A LUCKY BREAK. A FEDERAL district judge in California ruled that the Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy was unconstitutional in a case that had been initiated by Log Cabin Republicans, a group of GOPers who backed gay rights. The judge rejected the Justice Department’s request to temporarily suspend her order, pending an appeal. And the Pentagon had to rush to create guidelines for ending the policy in the jurisdiction covered by the order—before a higher court issued a stay. All this raised the specter of chaos for the Pentagon: a court could force it to end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell at a moment’s notice. Gates feared the worst—losing control—and this made him a fan of enacting legislation, and doing so before the Republicans gained control of the House.
Soon after the court ruling, Obama called the chiefs to the Oval Office and told them, If we don’t repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell in an organized manner with Pentagon input, the courts will eventually force you to end the policy without much, or any, warning. Army chief of staff General George Casey Jr. replied that the courts couldn’t do that on their own.
The president was surprised that Casey wasn’t acknowledging this very real possibility. Yes, they can, he responded, and they just might.
Obama didn’t win over the chiefs. Moreover, he couldn’t tell if the chiefs didn’t fully understand the court system or were in denial. Soon after, White House aides were told that Gates, too, had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and informed them that it was necessary for the Pentagon to lift the ban on its own terms before the courts compelled the military to ditch Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
DURING A BUSY TIME—THE CONGRESSIONAL MIDTERM CAMPAIGN was in full gear, the White House was trying to figure out what could be done to improve the flagging economy, the Bush-tax-cuts battle was brewing—Obama kept a close watch on Messina. This was a top priority for the president, but he had chosen to win this change through a careful and deliberate process that was not in public view.
At an October town hall meeting, a Howard University professor grilled Obama on his failure to repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell through executive order, as President Harry Truman had done in racially integrating the military in 1948. Obama insisted that he could not end the policy with a stroke of a pen, but said he had been able “for the first time” to get the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense secretary to support repeal. He added, repeal “has to be done in a way that is orderly.” It was classic Obama: attempting to achieve change through consensus, not confrontation.
“This policy will end, and it will end on my watch,” he declared.
Orderly change was not a rousing rallying cry. For months, some gay rights activists had been screaming at and about Messina, fearful that he was not orchestrating a vigorous enough effort. Messina’s response mirrored Obama’s attitude: You got to stick to the game plan.
ONCE THE REPUBLICANS WON CONTROL OF THE HOUSE IN NOVEMBER, repeal was on the line. Time was running out. The defense bill in Congress was caught in the usual partisan gridlock. And White House aides had picked up rumors that the Pentagon study might recommend separate quarters or bathrooms for gay and straight soldiers. Anything of that sort would generate instant controversy and could blow up their best-laid plans. If anyone at the Defense Department wanted to double-cross the White House, placing over-the-top recommendations in the report would be an easy and clever way to do so.
But during a briefing in the Situation Room, Pentagon officials gave Messina, Schiliro, and Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, a reassuring preview of the study. A Pentagon poll had found that many soldiers, especially younger ones, didn’t care about serving with gays and lesbians. Obama’s aides breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But this didn’t guarantee action on Capitol Hill. In late November, the White House and Harry Reid’s office were each unsure of the other’s commitment to accomplishing repeal in the few remaining weeks. To Reid and his staffers, it seemed that the White House cared more about ratifying the pending New START treaty. “They would love both, but their first, second, and third goal was START,” a senior Democratic Senate aide recalled.
But as White House aides saw it, Reid was constantly warning the White House that there was not enough time to take care of both New START and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, especially when a tax-cut deal was not yet worked out. (Months later, Democratic Senate staffers would note that Reid had heroically pushed for repeal and done the real heavy lifting; White House aides would contend that they, acting at the president’s initiative, had soldiered on, despite Reid’s pessimism. In Washington, such conflicting perspectives are not uncommon.)
ON NOVEMBER 30, THE PENTAGON RELEASED THE REPORT. IT was exactly what Obama had hoped for: repeal, it stated, posed no serious risks. Seventy percent of service members, according to the study, said that repeal would yield positive, mixed, or no consequences. In other words, America’s fighters were not worried. At a press conference, Gates pointed out that ending this ban “would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.” He insisted it was a “matter of urgency” that Congress pass repeal before the lame-duck session ended.
There was still resistance from the brass. General Casey and Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos, testifying on Capitol Hill, both beseeched Congress not to alter the policy. Repeal, Casey warned, “would be a major cultural and policy change in the middle of the war.”
Seizing upon this testimony, McCain threatened to filibuster the pending defense authorization bill with the repeal provision. Sixty senators—the number needed to break a filibuster—were now on record as supporting repeal, but Republicans had also pledged to stand with their party in opposing the defense authorization legislation until the Senate passed a tax-cut measure and Reid permitted more debate on amendments to the defense bill. (Reid contended there wasn’t sufficient time to do that.) This meant that McCain likely had the forty-one votes for a filibuster.
On December 9, Reid tried to move the defense bill toward a vote, and McCain made good on his threat: the Republicans blocked the measure. News reports noted that this could well be the end of the repeal effort. It looked as if the Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell ban might survive the lame-duck session. Solmonese accused both parties of engaging in “shameful schoolyard spats.”
About this time, Brian Bond, a White House aide working on the issue, called leading gay rights activists to the White House. Some were worried the whole endeavor was on the verge of collapse and doubted Obama’s commitment to the cause. Bond wanted to keep the activists galvanized. He was in a tough position. As a former leader of a gay rights group, he was often the target of the community’s frustration—and often on the receiving end of a familiar complaint: Why isn’t the president doing more?
Bond had earlier arranged for his boss, Valerie Jarrett, to address the dozen or so advocates. The plan was simple: she would say the president, her good friend, remained committed to repealing Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. That presumably would have more weight than another yeah-we’re-on-it from Bond.
As Jarrett was about to head to the meeting, she mentioned it to Obama. Bring them here, he said: If you’re backing up Brian, why don’t I just talk to them to back you up?
Bond escorted the group to the Roosevelt Room, and once they were seated, Obama entered.
“Something tells me you don’t believe I’m committed to this,” he told the group. “So rather than listen to Valerie or Brian, you can hear it from me.”
Obama acknowledged that repeal seemed to be taking longer than it should. “I just want you to know,” he said, “I’m going to get this done.”
How? one of the activists asked.
Obama already had a Plan B in mind: a stand-alone bill to repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. That would take some doing, given the procedural obstacles to quick action on anything in the Senate. And Obama wasn’t yet ready to discuss the possibility.
“You have to trust me,” he said.
THE DAY AFTER McCAIN LED THE FILIBUSTER AGAINST THE DEFENSE bill, Lieberman and Collins introduced that stand-alone bill to repeal the ban. The Washington Post called it a “Hail Mary.” McCain was furious with his friend Lieberman.
It would be difficult to ram a new measure through the Senate, but Reid vowed he would use his power as majority leader to skip the committee process and bring the bill up for a quick vote. Pelosi declared that she could move an identical measure quickly through the House. And Obama’s underutilized Organizing for America e-mailed its millions of supporters, asking them to pressure Republican senators. Reid would need a handful of GOPers to skirt a Republican filibuster attempt.
Robert Gates signaled that he was for quick congressional action: with no legislation, he said, “my greatest worry will be that then we are at the mercy of the courts and all the lack of predictability that that entails.”
MUCH WAS HAPPENING ON CAPITOL HILL. THE FINAL DETAILS of the tax-cut deal were being hammered out. Vice President Biden, looking to round up Senate Republicans for ratification of the New START treaty, was in intense discussions with hesitant GOPers. During those talks, McCain and Lindsey Graham hinted at a deal: forget about repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and we could support the treaty.
They did manage to put it more subtly. They claimed that forcing a vote on repeal would create a sour mood among Republican senators, and opposition to New START would solidify. They were not offering a quid pro quo, but it was close. Their message was akin to a Sopranos-style warning: nice little arms control treaty you have here, Mr. Vice President; it’d be a pity if anything were to happen to it.
Hill Democrats heard rumors about this tempting offer and worried that the White House would not resist. Biden did view McCain and Graham’s implied threat as serious. His own aides could not tell if Biden thought it best to call the McCain-Graham bluff or cave to their threat. “Biden is the ultimate senator,” recalled a White House official. “He was very concerned about our ability to get START ratified without making a deal. We were playing high-stakes poker. It was a nervous game for everyone.”
The vice president conveyed the offer to his boss. Obama’s response demonstrated his dry sense of humor. “Joe,” he said, “I know you’ll get the votes on START. You’re just trying to make it easier on yourself.”
Obama told the vice president he was not yielding on Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, and he instructed Biden to pass that on to McCain and Graham. The president understood the risks: the ratification of New START now might be jeopardized.
ON DECEMBER 15, THE STILL-DEMOCRATIC HOUSE VOTED 250–175 for the stand-alone repeal bill. Fifteen Republicans backed the bill, fifteen Democrats did not. But this was the easy vote. Boehner did not whip the Republican conference against the measure. The real test was in the Senate.
For these final days, Messina practically moved into Biden’s office in the Senate and closely tracked which senators were for or against the measure.
During the floor debate, an irritated McCain declared, “I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage.”
A filibuster attempt flopped, with McCain coming up eight votes shy. Lieberman and Collins’s repeal bill then sailed through on a 65–31 vote, with eight Republicans joining the Democrats.
Messina was standing off the Senate floor, with Joe Solmonese and other gay rights advocates—some of whom had often clashed with Messina over strategy. Valerie Jarrett was with them. As the measure passed, Messina and Solmonese were both in tears.
THAT SAME DAY, OBAMA FELL SHORT ON ANOTHER LAST-MINUTE goal. The DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented student immigrants who had come to the United States as children, was killed by a GOP filibuster. With fifty-five senators voting for the Obama-endorsed measure, the bill was five below the supermajority needed to bring the measure to a final vote. Most Senate Democrats supported the measure, which had passed in the House, but five—Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, and Kay Hagan of North Carolina—voted against it. And Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia had ducked out of votes that day for a Christmas party.
Obama had come close; had he been able to persuade his own party comrades, he would have bagged another major lame-duck success. But he had at least obtained a political victory. With both parties needing to compete for votes in the growing Latino American community, Obama and the Democrats had placed the Republicans on record as thwarting legislation important for this crucial bloc.
FOR THE PRESIDENT AND HIS AIDES, REPEALING DON’T ASK/Don’t Tell was a reaffirmation of his pragmatic approach. He had coaxed Gates and Mullen—even when doing so irritated his core supporters and alarmed gay rights advocates. He had not thumped his chest and demanded an end to a discriminatory policy. He had not relied on movement politics or called for sustained outside pressure. His nonconfrontational approach had yielded the results he desired. “He always felt that he could only do this if he had the Pentagon involved and that he had to walk them through the process,” a White House aide observed.
There was another takeaway for Obama and his White House team: they prevailed because they stayed with the strategy. After the vote, Messina would routinely point out that the gay rights community had screamed at him for six months—while the president waited for the Pentagon report and time was running out—but that everything worked out because “you got to stick to the game plan.”
Obama had benefited from at least one lucky bounce: the September federal court decision. The president’s initial approach had left little margin for error or delay, and as 2010 went by, it did seem that granting the Pentagon so much time to produce the report could undercut the repeal effort. Yet that court ruling—which had resulted from the endeavors of Republican gay activists—had concentrated Gates’s mind and prompted him to meet the same end-of-year deadline the president faced.
Coming two weeks after the tax-cut deal had been sealed, the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was a deliverable for die-hard Democratic progressives who had been upset by Obama’s failure to stop the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
“Our base really fucking cared about DADT,” one White House aide said. “A big amount.” Obama cared, too. “He knew a lot of people thought it would be easy to do this,” Gibbs later said, “when he had thought it would be hard.”
Days after the Senate victory, Obama asked Messina to join him for the ride to the Interior Department building for the signing ceremony.
“This reminds our people that we can still do big things,” the president told his deputy chief of staff. And, Obama added, it was also a reminder for the White House staff.
Many of Obama’s successes had been either mixed (the tax-cut deal) or ugly (the health care initiative). This win was unadulterated and complete. “That day was a high point in the presidency for him,” a senior administration official recalled, “in part because people had doubted him.”