NYT's Frank 'Panchito' Bruni: Where’s your apology for signing the Defense of Marriage Act, Bill Clinton?

Photo: Yanina Manolova, AP

The New York Time's former food columnist (savaged here by the Center for American Progress) looks beyond the slick way Bill Clinton has finessed his record on DOMA and calls him to task. For the full piece go to the New York Times, here.

You fret about your legacy, as any president would. For turning a blind eye to the butchery in Rwanda, you struggled through a mea culpa of sorts, and after Barack Obama seemed to lavish higher praise on Ronald Reagan than on you, you seethed.
     Well, DOMA, which says that the federal government recognizes only marriages of a man and a woman, is one of the uglier blemishes on your record... you’ve never wholly owned up to that, never made adequate amends. It’s past time, and it’s almost time for Hillary... to catch up with other cabinet members and President Obama and make her presumed support for same-sex marriage explicit, which she has never done.
     DOMA is a nasty bit of business, in practical as well as symbolic terms. It denies federal pension, health care and medical leave benefits — among many other protections and considerations — to same-sex couples who have been legally married in the growing number of states that permit it...
     At the convention in Charlotte three months ago, in remarks that sprawled over 48 minutes, you seemed to find room for just about everything but same-sex marriage. President Obama mentioned the issue in his speech. So did Michelle Obama in hers. But nothing from you, and no particular advocacy or fund-raising for the marriage-equality referendums that were on the ballot on Nov. 6... You presented a mum, behind-the-curve contrast to the next generation of Democratic standard-bearers like Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, and Martin O’Malley, the Maryland governor, whose pleas for marriage equality underscore a new reality: no Democrat, not even Hillary, will be able to make a credible bid for the party’s presidential nomination without supporting it.
     ...You had a zest for politicking that the current president doesn’t, enormous powers of persuasion and an instinct for the center. Maybe DOMA was the center in 1996. It isn’t anymore.