Clinton: Court Was 'Wrong' on Eminent Domain

WASHINGTON - President Clinton yesterday added his voice to a growing chorus of Americans of various political persuasions who disagree with a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government's use of eminent domain powers to take private property from one owner and give it to another.

Speaking to a conference of liberal college students, Mr. Clinton stated his disagreement with the court's decision last month, by a 5-4 vote, to allow a Connecticut city to carry out a redevelopment project by seizing 15 properties over the owners' objections.

"I wouldn't make that old lady in Norwalk sell her house," the former president said. "She was all 70 years or 80 years old. I thought it was wrong."

The former president used the example to illustrate his belief that few Americans are strictly orthodox in their political views. He said it was the first time he could remember agreeing with a dissent filed by two of the court's most conservative members, Justices Scalia and Thomas.

"I never thought it would happen," said Mr. Clinton, who once taught constitutional law while a professor in Arkansas.

Property-rights activists, who have deplored the ruling, said they were delighted and not entirely surprised to have Mr. Clinton speak out against the decision.

"That underscores what we've seen since the opinion was announced, this outrage from liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, if they have any principle at all," said Chip Miller, a spokesman for a conservative legal group, the Institute for Justice.

Mr. Clinton's views on the issue did not appear ironclad. After offering his assessment, he added, "I might be wrong." He also flubbed the name of the city involved, which was New London, not Norwalk.

In his speech, Mr. Clinton also criticized press coverage of statements his wife, Senator Clinton, has made recently in which she appeared to stray from a doctrinaire line advanced by abortion rights advocates.

"If you're a Democrat and you have sort of normal impulses, you're a sellout, like when Hillary said, 'Abortion is a tragedy for virtually everybody who undergoes it. We ought to do what we can to reduce abortion,' " Mr. Clinton said.

"But if John McCain, who's pro-life, works with Hillary on global warming, he's a man of principle moving to the middle. If President Bush appoints a moderate to the Supreme Court, we won't say he sold out. We'll say, 'Oh, how grand he is,' " the former president said, throwing his hands in the air.

Mr. Clinton griped that Democrats who express moderate views are pilloried. "If you're a Democrat and you talk to somebody in the middle, oh my God, you have no convictions, you have no backbone," he said. "It violates human nature. It violates the facts before us, and it's nuts."

The former president attributed the differing treatment to a determined effort by conservatives to reframe political reporting.

"They started realizing they were in an intellectual hole in the 1960s, and they've been working for 40 years to shape the debate. One of the things they've done is to shape the way our friends in the mainstream media write the stories," Mr. Clinton said.

Mr. Clinton made his remarks at a conference of more than 600 college students, organized by a think tank that employs many former members of his White House staff, the Center for American Progress. The former president urged the left-leaning students to take recent Republican electoral victories in stride.

"The truth is, we're in better shape than it appears we are," Mr. Clinton said. "The idea that progressive politics is dead is wrong." He said Democrats have rarely won by large margins nationally and added that Mr. Bush's margin of victory last year was a narrow one.

"President Carter won by two points in 1976 when he was a Southern governor, a born-again Christian, a graduate of the Naval Academy, and a peanut farmer. After Watergate, he won by two points," Mr. Clinton said. He blamed the Democrats' difficulties on a "cultural aversion" that many married white Protestants hold towards the party.

Over time, he said, demographic trends would carry more votes to the Democrats.

Many of the students at the session brought up an issue that has gotten little press attention, the genocidal violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Mr. Clinton expressed support for the Bush administration's efforts on the issue, but he said a larger peacekeeping force must be sent to the region immediately, even if troops from outside of Africa are required.

He admitted that his administration failed to act to stop similar massacres in Rwanda in 1994.

"It's the biggest regret of my administration," he said. "At the time, we were reeling from Somalia and trying to get into Bosnia. ... The world just missed it."

In his speech, Mr. Clinton did not comment on the current controversy over the involvement of Mr. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, in the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame. However, in response to questions from The New York Sun, Mr. Clinton said his concern about the issue goes beyond whether Mr. Rove broke the law. "I don't think we should be outing CIA agents, even if the rather detailed requirements of the act weren't met, but I don't want to prejudge anything, because I don't know what the facts are," the former president said.

Mr. Clinton also expressed support for Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson IV, whose CIA-sponsored trip to Africa to investigate alleged Iraqi nuclear procurement is at the center of the imbroglio. "Joe Wilson is a good man who was a career diplomat who voted for President Bush, not me, in '92. I don't think that he should have been punished because he wouldn't change his view about what he found in Niger," Mr. Clinton said.

An organizer of the conference, David Halperin, said his operation, dubbed Campus Progress, is striving to respond to concerns that conservatives are doing a better job of inspiring and grooming a new generation of political leaders. "These activities that we're doing are in a certain sense similar to the ones conservative groups have been doing on campuses for 30 years," he said. "Our goals are sort of to take on the right and advance the progressive movement."

Before the former president's speech began, the students swarmed two former aides to Mr. Clinton who often debate for the Democrats on television, Paul Begala and Dee Dee Myers.

A senior at Seton Hall who attended the meeting, Alexa McDonnell, 21, said she appreciated that Mr. Clinton's speech largely refrained from bashing the Republicans.

"That really appeals to me, that it was not so strictly based on party," she said.

Correction from July 18, 2005: Chip Mellor is the president of a libertarian legal advocacy group, Institute for Justice. An incorrect name appeared in a story on page 1 of the July 14 New York Sun.