This has encouraged both Clintons to recount a version of the DOMA debate in which they were actually helping the cause of equality by forestalling the passage of a Federal Marriage Amendment, which, had it been put in place, would have prevented all the legal and political work that eventually brought marriage equality to all 50 states.

It's a politically convenient story, and it has the virtue of fitting the broad macro facts about how American law and politics developed in the 20-year time span between 1995 and 2015. Unfortunately for the Clintons, a detailed examination of the documentary evidence from the Clinton White House by BuzzFeed's Chris Geidner makes it pretty clear that it's not true. If DOMA ultimately served the role that the Clintons are now attributing to it, it did so largely by coincidence, not as a result of strategy...

Yet faced with the popularity of DOMA and its overwhelming support in Congress, Clinton signed the law and ran radio ads touting his support of it in Southern states. He signed it in the middle of the night, with no cameras present and without a signing ceremony, as if he knew at the time that he would not want it to be part of his legacy, though he did want it to be part of his reelection campaign...

"There is no contemporaneous evidence, however, to support the claim that the Clinton White House considered a possible federal constitutional amendment to be a concern, based on a BuzzFeed News review of the thousands of documents released earlier this year by the Clinton Presidential Library about same-sex couples’ marriage rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. In the documents, which include correspondence from a wide array of White House and Justice Department officials, no one even hints that Bill Clinton’s thinking or actions regarding DOMA were animated by the threat of a federal constitutional amendment..."

But on a bigger level, DOMA is a reminder of the politics of "triangulation" that characterized much of the Clinton years. While Hillary Clinton has heavily invested in an image of herself as a gritty "fighter" for progressive causes, the realities of the mid-1990s were rather different. While Obama-era Republicans have generally pursued a politics of hostage taking and high-stakes confrontation, Clinton-era congressional Republicans were often much more willing to cut deals. The Clinton administration was also very willing to cut deals, signing things like DOMA, the 1996 welfare reform bill, and a 1997 budget agreement that cut capital gains taxes. This spirit of dealmaking largely evaporated when Republicans decided to impeach Clinton. For example, it's widely believed that the impeachment crisis scuttled a nascent Clinton-Gingrich agreement to partially privatize Social Security.

The DOMA episode is a reminder of many liberal leaders' secret fears about the prospect of a new Clinton administration. Namely that far from being fighters, the Clintons are actually inveterate compromisers who might be excessively willing to go along with GOP legislative initiatives if Republicans could bother to set aside their Benghazi inquiries for a few months and come up with some initiatives. The new Clinton line on DOMA casts them as savvy strategists who helped outwit the right, but the historical record seems to show transactional politicians who made a cynical calculus that they had a lot to lose and nothing to gain from opposing DOMA.