One thing about the Clinton team: because they've been the object of sophisticated (and well-financed) ratfcking for over 25 years, they've developed a real talent for opposition research their own selves. And that was before they hired David Brock, whom the campaign needs to put in a walk-in freezer for a few weeks. (The HRC campaign is being as ill-served by its surrogates, from Brock to Madeleine Albright to the candidate's husband, as any campaign I've ever seen. And whoever leaked the possible campaign staff shakeup to Tiger Beat On The Potomac needs firing badly.) Consequently, we have this little tidbit that they spread around about something Bernie Sanders did in 1982.

The document, apparently signed by Sanders in his capacity as Burlington mayor, designates "We Believe in Marriage Week" for the city. The third "whereas" for resolution says marriage "should be viewed as a lifelong commitment between husband and wife filled with mutual respect and open, honest communications." Although saying marriage is between a man and a woman has becoming a rallying cry in recent years for opponents of same-sex marriage, nothing in the resolution explicitly says gay people should be excluded from the institution. As a whole, the document promotes marriage as a "cornerstone of the American society" and family as a societal institution, which could easily apply to married gay people.

The precedent in the woodpile, of course, is the fact that, 14 years later, President Bill Clinton signed the egregious Defense Of Marriage Act because he wanted to get re-elected in 1996, and because the execrable Dick Morris told him it was a sure-fire votegrabber, and, alas, it was, at least as far as turning off that issue for the balance of that year's campaign. (The official Clinton line is he signed DOMA to stave off a proposed constitutional amendment banning marriage equality. This is, to say the least, untested history. After all, Bill Clinton didn't even mention DOMA in his great cement block of an autobiography.) In fact, much of what has been bedeviling his wife this year has its roots in the carnival of triangulation that powered the stretch drive of Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign.

To wit:

On August 22, Bill Clinton signed a welfare "reform" bill that was far more punitive than it had to be, and that, in any case, was designed almost completely within a conservative/Republican frame that they had been carefully constructing for more than a decade. (Democratic senators begged him to soften, among other things, the effects on the Supplemental Security Income program. He refused. Bad things happened in the country.) A month later, he signed DOMA. A couple of weeks later, he got re-elected. The following year, he signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, repealing the Glass-Steagall financial regulations that had held since the New Deal.

Now all of this certainly can be defended on the grounds that it kept the wolves at bay during the Gingrich years, and it might even have bought him some conservative Democratic votes when the kabuki impeachment drama opened in D.C. Indeed, it can be argued convincingly that this was the only way a Democratic president could govern in the 1990s, as well as the only way this particular president even could stay in office. But there are other consequences as well, and some of them are bubbling up in this campaign. In 2008, HRC was hamstrung because she was complicit in a Republican president's war. This time, she's struggling with the legacy of her husband's triangulations. If you want to know why things have gotten so personal, that's part of the reason.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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