AnotherVoice

Waxahachie, Texas, March 29, 2005 -- Believing what I was raised to hold sacred, that every voice counts, I've bombarded my local paper for years with letters and op-eds (and been active in politics). Yet here in the heart of everyone's favorite "red state," where it's especially important that another voice be heard, no one seemed to be listening. This is my megaphone.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Slide talk

As she strove to justify her claim that she should continue to seek the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton got herself into a heap of trouble with almost everyone — Democrats, Republicans, undeclared delegates, print journalists, an array of columnists in print and on the internet, the expected TV talking heads, and of course bloggers — for what might be minimally characterized as an injudicious reference to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

At first reluctant to join the made-for-opinion pile-on because it would be too easy, I thought about it a little harder and soon realized how few of her critics seemed to have noticed that her argument was completely flawed.

Hillary had told the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where one of the last two Democratic primaries was to take place June 3rd, that it was completely reasonable for the contest to go into June because, “You know my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June,” she said.

But it’s apples and bananas. It’s a false analogy. Back in the day we would have called it “slide talk.” Different from spinning — offering the best possible interpretation of something — or lying, slide talk is telling the truth in such a way designed to manipulate or give a false impression.

In 1992, California didn’t hold its presidential primary until June. In 1992 Bill Clinton held the lead, though not the lock, on delegates until the California primary voters clinched the nomination for him in June. In short, in 1992 the process wasn’t quite done until then.

In a December 2007 conversation with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Mrs. Clinton agreed with him that the process has become much more compressed since 1992, as various states moved their primaries up in the hope of wielding more influence.

One of those states was California; from 1996 through 2004, Californians voted in March, but then moved up again to February for the 2008 election.

In other words, the process Hillary Clinton has been talking about was really pretty much all over on this year’s Super Tuesday, February 5th, when 24 states including California held their primaries.

And in that December 2007 conversation, she had said, “We are competing everywhere through February 5th. … I’m in it for the long run. It’s not a very long run — it’ll be over by February 5th!”

No, ma’am, there is no valid comparison between where we’ll be in June this year with where we were in June of 1992, and I’m disappointed that this point has not been made in the general commotion about her remarks.

As for the part of her statement that drew most of the attention, it was her intent, she explained, simply to offer examples of campaigns that ran into June: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Do we? I remember that it was California, where I lived at the time, and I remember where I was when the news broke, and I remember the despair that swept the country. But that it was June?

And can it be that an intelligent, well-informed person with 35 years of political experience really couldn’t think of any other such contest between 1968 and 1992? Or didn’t have the sense to stop with the 1992 example?

Remember: California’s primary this year was in February.

No, this is a woman who does not make an unplanned remark, who calculates every statement down to the punctuation marks. She said what she meant to say, and in true Clintonian fashion apologized — sort of — later.

“The jury will disregard that remark” popped into my mind. That’s shorthand in some circles for a trial lawyer’s tactic of eliciting inadmissible testimony that is certain to cause his opponent to object, after which the judge sternly informs the jury that it must pretend the remark was never heard. Right.

But if in fact Mrs. Clinton truly misspoke so grave an allusion, then she is clearly unqualified to serve in the one office in the land where such an error may bring disastrous consequences for the country.

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Peace for our time?

A couple of weeks back, President Bush traveled to Israel to join that determined-to-survive and thriving little country in celebrating its 60th birthday. In a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Mr. Bush somehow found it appropriate to lash out at “some” who suggest that talking to one’s enemies may be a good beginning idea.

Whoever he meant by “some,” the perfect irony is where he said it, because the concept of the importance of talking not just to our friends but also to our enemies is old hat to Israelis. It was none other than Yitzhak Rabin, speaking as Prime Minister of Israel back in 1993, who said, “One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy.”

However Mr. Bush might choose to characterize the notion of talking to people whose behavior we don’t like, there is no arguing with the truth stated by one of Israel’s greatest statesmen —someone who was in a position to know whereof he spoke.

And just in case the reference to “some” went right over people’s heads, the ever-helpful John McCain tag-teamed with Mr. Bush to make sure everyone understood what Mr. Bush had said and then linked it to the campaign by first expounding on the idea of “talking = appeasement” and then cleverly declining to say whether he thought Barack Obama’s suggestion that we should talk to Iran would make him an appeaser.

But history is on the side of Rabin and Obama. Israel’s peace-making efforts since 1967 have succeeded with Egypt, an enemy they chose to talk to, and with Jordan, another enemy turned friend by talking. Not to mention the Palestinian Liberation Organization, now the Palestinian Authority, and Rabin’s willingness to talk to Yassir Arafat, because of which the old enemies began the long hard road to a two-state solution.

Mr. Bush himself apparently thought it was okay to talk to Muammar Qadaaffi, of Libya, notwithstanding that dictator’s support of terrorism (Pan Am 103), and he proudly says it was his administration’s negotiations that brought about Libya’s agreement to abandon pursuit of nuclear arms.

And don’t forget North Korea, where Mr. Bush’s emissaries have been engaged with a clearly dangerous despot, Kim Jong Il, in an effort to end his nuclear weapons program, an effort that seems on its way to paying off.

So it was puzzling when Mr. Bush veered away from the celebration at hand to suggest that anyone who even suggested talking to the enemy was pretty much in the same league as Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister whose actions in the run-up to WWII have established him, in the eyes of some, as the model for appeasement.

In his speech in Israel, Mr. Bush said, “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. … We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Never mind that Mr. Chamberlain talked to the enemy and gave the enemy what it wanted, namely, a big bite out of Czechoslovakia, in exchange for nothing more than a worthless promise by Hitler to behave himself.

And never mind that the American Heritage dictionary definition of appeasement is “to pacify or placate (someone) by acceding to their demands.”

Well, never mind the facts. Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain clearly intended to label as an appeaser and bad-as-Chamberlain anyone who dares suggest even talking to an enemy. After all, this is modern American politics, and the faster you can paste a nasty label onto your opponent, the better.

Well, Mr. Obama jumped on it “like a duck on a June-bug,” as Ernie Ford used to say:

“George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists,” said Obama, “and the president's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel. …

“Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy — to pressure countries like Iran and Syria.”

“I am happy to have a debate with John McCain and George Bush about foreign policy,” Obama said. “I believe that there is no separation between George Bush and John McCain when it comes to our Middle East policy, and I think their policy has failed.”

Somewhat inconveniently, it was only the day before all this that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had said, "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage . . . and then sit down and talk with them." Oops! Another appeaser, right there in Mr. Bush’s cabinet.

And the day after was just as inconvenient. A new video hit YouTube and newscasts across the country: Here was John McCain, back in 2006, live and in color, interviewed by James Rubin for SkyNews:

RUBIN: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCAIN: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another… it's a new reality in the Middle East.”

Beautiful.

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