One-Sided Conversations
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Senator Clinton has been getting an easy ride in her campaign “conversation,” but it needs to be said that some of the claims she has been making in her early presidential campaign appearances are preposterous. In an editorial January 24, we pointed out the hollowness of her suggestion, in her first conversation chat, that President Bush had been refusing to talk with other nations in the Middle East. In the next two chats, she laid it on even thicker.
On Wednesday night, she claimed that President Bush is stuck in a cocoon. “It is as though there is a little echo chamber where everybody is saying the same thing where the president, from what we’ve been told, is rarely challenged or confronted,” she said. After all the news articles about the divide within the administration between the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and the secretary of state, Colin Powell, on one side and Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on the other side, it’s just silly to speak of the Bush administration as a place “where everybody is saying the same thing.”
Senator Schumer was quoted in the New York Times yesterday that “the counter to Cheney was Karl Rove.” If “everybody is saying the same thing,” why would Mr. Cheney need a counter? As for the notion that Mr. Bush is “rarely challenged or confronted,” was Mrs. Clinton vacationing in Anguilla during the three presidential debates he had with Senator Kerry? Or during the regular of White House press conferences, in which Mr. Bush fields non-challenging, non-confrontational questions such as “are you still willing to follow a path that seems to be in opposition to the will of the American people?” and “Mr. President, Lyndon Johnson famously didn’t sleep during the Vietnam War, questioning his own decisions … And I wonder if you can talk to us about that. Has it been a painful time?”
Also on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton said, “I was adamantly opposed to the president’s plan to privatize Social Security because the very people it would have hurt the most are older women.” If that is why Mrs. Clinton opposed the private accounts, she may want to rethink her position, because Mr. Bush made clear from the outset — in, for example his 2005 State of the Union Address, “I have a message for every American who is 55 or older: Do not let anyone mislead you; for you, the Social Security system will not change in any way.”
The senator also called for “direct contact, engagement” with the Iranian government, and attacked the Bush administration for not talking to Iran. “They stopped talking to Iran. Instead they told the British, Germans and the French, you go talk to Iran. So that went on for years with no real results and Iran is just continuing to push forward,” she said. Well, it’s interesting to see Mrs. Clinton so dismissive of our European allies. But somehow we recall eight years of a Clinton administration in which America did not open an embassy in Tehran and President Clinton did not meet with Iranian leaders in a summit.
With the exception of a meeting between Secretary Albright and the Iranian foreign minister late in the Clinton administration, the Clinton strategy toward Iran was containment, not engagement, and the Iranians spent the two Clinton terms funding and planning the murder of American tourists, students, and airmen, not to mention the undermining of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, talks Mr. Clinton spent so much time and energy trying to mediate.
Finally was Mrs. Clinton’s call to readjust the balance between labor and management. “We’ve got to get back to a balance of power,” Mrs. Clinton said in Tuesday night’s conversation. “All of the power is on one side of the economic equation, namely with the employers, and employees can’t really, you know, get their fair share of the wonderful wealth and benefits that are being created for people at the higher end of the income spectrum,” Mrs. Clinton said.
It sounds like Soviet propaganda, and it is particularly ironical coming from someone such as Mrs. Clinton who served on the corporate board of Wal-Mart, which has resisted union organizing campaigns. Truth is, in an economy in which union costs are driving airlines into bankruptcy and General Motors and Ford into declines and billion-dollar losses, one starts to wonder whether the one who is really in the “echo chamber,” as Mrs. Clinton put it, is the current occupant of the White House or the junior senator from New York who is hoping to move back in.
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