By Jeffrey Page

A friend of mine just got a note from the president. In the guise of offering his best wishes to her for supporting the repeal of the 17-year atrocity called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Barack Obama mostly salutes himself.

He wrote, “When that bill reaches my desk [which it did], I will sign it [which he did], and this discriminatory law will be repealed.” Sorry, but I’m reminded of the expression about the guy who joins the cause one safe day after everyone else. He was, as you may recall, a day late and a dollar short.

I like Obama. I voted for him in 2008 and most likely will vote for him in 2012. I understand that doing anything to advance the constitutional rights of gay people is politically perilous. Still, Obama’s letter is weak. He applauds my friend but casually switches pronouns to the first person singular at every opportunity.

“The victory belongs to you,” Obama says. Nice. “Without your commitment,” Nice. “the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.” The promise that “I” made as a candidate seemed to have lost some of its urgency when “I” became the president.

There always was a reason to go slow.

Soon after he was inaugurated, Obama made clear that the repeal of this back-of-the-bus policy would have to wait, perhaps for more than a year because he had to discuss the change with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others at the Department of Defense. As if to suggest that generals, admirals and military chiefs of staff had not thought long and hard about the kind of time openly gay troops would have in the services. Substitute the word “change” in that first sentence with the words “granting of fundamental constitutional rights as Americans” and you could be astonished – shocked, actually – that the commander in chief decided he had to go slowly at all.

The reasoning was that granting such rights to Americans who wish to serve their country needed everybody on board even if those Americans would have to wait even longer for the right to choose any seat on the bus. Obama seemed to forget at times during 2009 and 2010 that he was the driver of that bus. He was the boss.

In May, Obama was advised that he could send Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell to the scrap heap by signing an executive order. He didn’t like that option.

So he waited for Congress to catch up, reportedly because he didn’t want to un-do Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell with the knowledge that a successor to the Oval Office could un-do his un-doing with a future executive order. As if politics would allow such a change to be made so cavalierly. But to reduce the possibility of such a political change back to Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Obama said he wanted the change to come in the form of legislation because Congress would not so easily un-do what a previous Congress and president had done.

In this, he seemed to go completely deaf to the fact that soon after the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, very serious talk began on the right that a GOP- controlled House of Representatives and a Senate whose Democratic control has been weakened should immediately take up the question of defunding and/or repealing national health care, the issue on which Obama spent most of his political capital.

It will be instructive to see how the legislation plays out in terms of how the military will deal with the same-sex husbands and wives of gay troops – issues of housing and dependent care come to mind – and how long it will take the Defense Department to come up with coherent plans for those aspects of the integration.

So we’ve finally ended the outrageous Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell policy and can look ourselves in the mirror. I’m grateful to Congress. I’m grateful to President Obama. But the self-congratulatory tone of his letter is a little over the top. After all, legions of good people have opposed this rule for 17 years.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

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