Bill Clinton at Netroots Nation. Watch it.

Former President Bill Clinton, addressing the attendees at NetrootsNation on Thursday.

Everyone will be talking about it, so save yourself the embarrassment and check out former President Bill Clinton’s speech from Thursday night to NetrootsNation right now.  It begins about 1:39:30 on the video, which you can find below the jump.

First, he speaks about his work, and that of the Clinton Global Initiative. This is good stuff, and it’s great to see that Clinton truly loves his post-Presidency work.

Then, at 1:48:30, he goes into politics.  Clinton: “We have entered a new era of progressive politics, which, if we do it right, could last thirty or forty years.”  Around eight minutes (and the country’s political history since Bobby Kennedy) later, he gets to President Obama’s election.

Shortly thereafter, at 1:59:00, Clinton is heckled regarding LGBT issues.  It is clear that Clinton is not happy.  His immediate response: “You know, you oughta go to one of those congressional health care meetings.  You’d do really well there.”  He then cools a bit and says that, if the heckler sits down, he’d “be glad to discuss it.”

President Clinton

Then, it gets really good.  This is the pissed-off Bill Clinton of yore.  Finger-wagging and all.  We learn, more clearly than ever before, that Clinton is very unhappy with his legacy on gays in the military.

You wanna talk about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I’ll tell you exactly what happened.  You couldn’t deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military.  And, the media supported them; they raised all kinds of devilment and all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting me some support in the Congress.  Now that’s the truth. . . . It’s true.  it’s true.  You may have noticed that presidents aren’t dictators. . . . . The [members of Congress] were going to reverse any attempt I made by executive order to force them to accept gays in the military.

He then went into a discussion of the policy v. promulgation debate, saying that the intent was that gay servicemembers would be able to march in gay parades and that “whatever mailings they get” wouldn’t be able to be used to oust gay servicemembers.  But then, he concludes this whole section by saying, “I hated what happened. I regret it.”  He finally talked about the stop-loss orders issued in the first Gulf War that stopped gay discharges.

Then, at 2:03:25, Clinton raises the Defense of Marriage Act.  He says:

Let me just say one thing about DOMA. . . . The reason I signed DOMA, and I said when I signed it, I thought the question of whether gays should marry should be left up to states and religious organizations, and if any church or other religious body wanted to recognize gay marriage they ought to.  We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary Congress, to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states.  And if you look at the 11 referendum, much later, in 2004, in the election . . . to try and get the base vote for President Bush up, I think it’s obvious that something had to be done to try to keep the Republican Congress [from sending a Federal Marriage Amendment to the states]. . . .

I didn’t like signing DOMA, and I certainly didn’t like the constraints that were put on benefits and I’ve done everything I could — I’m proud to say the State Department was the first federal department to restore benefits to gay partners in the Obama Administration.  And I think we’re going forward in the right direction now for federal employees.  And I don’t — I don’t like the DOMA bill.

More on all that later on here.

And, finally, he gets into health care at 2:05:10.  The top line: Referring to Obama, Clinton said: “Start with what he said.” Number one: “The worst thing of all, and the most danger to the most people, is sticking with the status quo.  It is bankrupting America, making families insecure and undermining the future of the country.” Second thing: “Figure the three or four things that” everyone wants in the bill and the “three or four things” that we all agree we don’t want in the bill.  “Then, you can say whatever you want — but first we have to win the big argument.”

On health care politics, at 2:14:28, Clinton states: “It is not only the morally right thing to do, it is politically imperative for Democrats to pass a health care bill now.”  I bet that’s the line we hear from everyone on the talk shows.  He concludes, pleading to the progressives: “Try to keep this in the lane of getting something done. . . . It is so important.”

At 2:17:50, Clinton closes out on climate change and Congress.

So, this is a wonky Clinton, but it also is a Clinton whose political wounds — from health care to gay issues — still smart.

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Finally, some more extended thoughts about Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and Defense of Marriage Act statements, both of which were quite remarkable.

As I described after watching the clip the first time, it’s clear that Clinton is genuinely angered about the way that his role in today’s implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is viewed.  Sure, it’s a politician’s gloss, but his passion here is genuine, and I feel for the guy.

But, then there’s DOMA, where Clinton becomes far less passionate and far more political.  Citing the 2004 post-Goodridge, Bush-re-election year anti-marriage amendments as proof of the need for the 1996 DOMA is just lazy, and Clinton knows it.  There might very well be proof, but that’s not it.

Second, even today, it’s interesting that Clinton could make that whole portion of the speech about the politics of marriage equality, and yet removed himself and his re-election from that equation.  The whole thing is about how the Good Democrats were stopping the Bad Republicans from something Even Worse — and not how few Democrats were willing to stand up against the intolerance of the Republicans, from Clinton on down.  The whole point of his speech, really, was how we could be in a new ascendency of progressive politics, yet Clinton the constant politician couldn’t admit how he himself also was a part of the politics of his day.

What’s more, despite the rope-line report from a month ago that Clinton now supports marriage equality, much ballyhooed throughout the blogosphere, the stark lack of any statement supporting marriage equality beyond Dick Cheney’s “[d]ifferent states will make different decisions” statement is notable.  This was the netroots, this was the online progressive base of the Democratic Party.  If not here, where?

As I discussed at the time, there’s a lot of nuance in politicians’ “support” for marriage equality, and I think it’s about time that we start asking politicians to explain exactly what their “support” entails.

[UPDATE: More on the questioner (aka heckler) from Towleroad.  Lane Hudson, the questioner, has an explanation for interrupting the former President at The Huffington Post.]

[The video of Clinton's speech can be found below the jump.]

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Former President Clinton at NetrootsNation on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009.

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