DNC AD HITS MCCAIN ON ‘100 YEARS’ COMMENT

The Democratic National Committee is launching a television ad that aggressively targets Senator McCain’s much-debated comment that he would be “fine” if American forces stayed in Iraq for 100 years. The 30-second cable spot plays and then repeats a clip of Mr. McCain making the remark at a January town hall in New Hampshire, interspersing fiery images from Iraq and statistics of the war’s cost in American lives and money. The ad concludes with a narrator’s voice asking, “If all he offers is more of the same, is John McCain the right choice for America’s future?” Democrats including senators Clinton and Obama have seized on Mr. McCain’s comment, but his campaign has fired back by repeatedly accusing them of distorting his words. The Arizona senator, the campaign says, was not saying he would continue the war for 100 years but rather that America might have an extended military presence along the lines of what it has had in South Korea. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Robert Duncan, yesterday responded to the launch of the ad by the DNC chairman, Howard Dean, by criticizing him for engaging in “more of the same undignified political rhetoric and attacks.”

PRESIDENT CLINTON: OBAMA FLUNKS ’90s HISTORY

President Clinton is faulting his wife’s opponent in the Democratic presidential race, Senator Obama, for disregarding the successes of the 1990s. “On occasion, he says there’s no difference between what happened when I was president and when President Bush is in office,” Mr. Clinton said. “That may be good politics, but you wouldn’t get a very good grade on a history exam if you gave that answer.”

THE NATION, NBC FOCUS ON CLINTON WORK FOR COMMUNIST LAW FIRM

A liberal magazine, the Nation, is drawing attention to Senator Clinton’s summer working for an Oakland, Calif.-based law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. An essay by a former California state legislator, Thomas Hayden, noted that some partners at the firm were communists and that it specialized in representing Black Panthers and other left-wing activists. “Doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?” Mr. Hayden wrote in a passage read yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Mrs. Clinton’s clerkship at the Treuhaft firm was the subject of a series of in-depth articles in The New York Sun last year.

SENATE DEMOCRATS PLAN MANHATTAN FUND-RAISER

New Yorkers eager to break bread with Al Franken or one of more than a dozen other Democratic senators and Senate candidates from across the country will get a chance next week at a special breakfast fund-raiser May 7 at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. Breakfast is going for $250 a plate, but a guaranteed seat at a table with one of the Senate candidates is $1,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Sun yesterday.