NYT's Nagourney on the gay brouhaha

NYT

Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters....

The Obama White House in particular is reluctant to embrace gay rights issues now, officials there say, because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on health care and other initiatives.

This is, I think, the crux of the problem. Obama will do nothing that gives social conservatives an excuse to bitch and moan. He's never going to get fulfilling his major promises on gay rights, nor most of his other major "progressive" promises, provided he continues to live in mortal fear that someone on the right might get mad at him.