She still out there!
CLINTON STIRS SPECULATION ON HILLARY
Demurs on Choice Of Dean, Lieberman
By JOSHUA GERSTEIN Special to the Sun
MONTEREY, Calif. — President Clinton yesterday stoked speculation that his wife, Senator Clinton, will run for president in 2004.
Asked by his former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, whether there was “a chance” that Mrs. Clinton would run for president next year, Mr. Clinton left the door open.
“That’s really a decision for her to make,” he said at a public forum here.
The former president also said he believed many New Yorkers would have no objection to her breaking her pledge to serve a full six years in the Senate.
“I was impressed at the state fair in New York, which is in Republican country in upstate New York, at how many New Yorkers came up and said they would release her from her commitment if she wanted to do it,” Mr. Clinton said.“But she said...she just doesn’t understand how to walk away from that. So I just have to take her for where she is right now.”
In response to questions from The New York Sun about Mr. Clinton’s present-tense discussion of Mrs. Clinton’s possible presidential bid, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, sent the following statement: “Senator Clinton has repeatedly said that she will serve out her full six-year term. She loves her job and is working on being the best senator she can be for the people of New York.”
Asked whether Mrs. Clinton was still considering a run for the presidency, the spokesman repeated, “Senator Clinton has repeatedly said that she will serve out her full six-year term.” Mr. Reines said he would have no further comment.
As governor of Arkansas, Mr. Clinton made a similar pledge to serve out his term. He later traveled the state asking voters to release him from the promise and went on to mount a successful campaign for the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
Speaking to an audience of more than 2,000 people, most of whom paid $50 to attend,Mr.Clinton said he would not endorse any of the current Democratic presidential candidates during the primary phase of the campaign. However, asked about General Wesley Clark, who is expected today to announce his entry into the race, the former president was effusive.
“He is brilliant, he is brave and he is good,” Mr. Clinton said. He went on to tell the audience about the heroic effort General Clark made to save the lives of several American diplomats whose vehicle went off the road and exploded during peace talks in Bosnia. “He’s got a sack full of guts,” Mr. Clinton said.
The former president said General Clark would have “a good run here at the beginning.”
“Whether he can get elected president I don’t have a clue, because once you’ve been a four-star general it’s kind of hard to have people talk to you the way they talk to you when you’re running,” Mr. Clinton said, adding that he had recently given General Clark some advice on how to adjust to life in the political arena.
General Clark, like Mr. Clinton, is a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas.
Mr. Clinton also offered his first public prediction of how the Supreme Court might respond to efforts to get it to reinstate the election to recall California Governor Gray Davis. That vote was scheduled to take place on October 7, but on Monday it was postponed by a federal appeals court because of concerns about plans to use punch-card voting systems in several counties.
The former president said there was a “fair chance” the high court would choose not to get involved. “If Justice Scalia, who’s now sitting in this circuit, decides to go out and hire up the five votes necessary to say there’s a serious question here that ought to be heard …the easiest way out is for one of the five who voted [with the majority] in the Florida election case just to take a dive and say, ‘I disagree,’ and let it stand,” Mr. Clinton said.
Mr. Clinton did not answer an audience question about his biggest mistake while president, but he said the biggest disappointment was his inability to get a peace agreement in the Middle East. He called Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s decision not to accept the arrangement brokered by America in late 2000,“the most colossal mistake of my lifetime politically.”
However, the former president said it would be unwise for Israel to attempt to kill Mr. Arafat, as some have recently advocated.
“If they think they’d have all their problems over if they kill Arafat, they’ve got another think coming,” Mr. Clinton said. “They can’t kill or jail all their enemies.”
The president also suggested that Mr. Arafat once had Palestinian militants reined in but that he now lacks that power.
“They can no longer guarantee the Israelis 100% security because there are too many Hamas cells,” he said, referring to the Islamic terrorist group.
Asked by The New York Sun after the forum whether he thought Senator Lieberman or Howard Dean was closer to his Middle East policy, he demurred, saying he hadn’t seen last week’s debate in which the two candidates sparred over the issue.
Mr. Clinton offered a mixed verdict on President Bush’s foreign policy. He said that, before the recent war, he believed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hiding chemical and biological weapons and that President Bush was correct to turn up the heat on the Iraqi leader. But Mr. Clinton faulted Mr. Bush and his advisers for pressing forward to remove the Iraqi leader while U.N. inspectors were still pleading for more time.
“For them, regime change was more important than finding weapons of mass destruction, or finding out they weren’t there,” Mr. Clinton said. “That was just a hook.”
Mr. Clinton said that part of the administration’s motivation for attacking Iraq was political. White House political aide “Karl Rove was pushing it for obvious reasons,” the former president said without elaborating.
Mr. Clinton joined with critics of Mr. Bush who have faulted him for allowing Iraq to become a magnet for Muslim militants.
“There were no Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Iraq to speak of, as far as I know, before 9/11, and now we’ve got a mess of them, because it’s... an opportunity to go shoot at Americans,” he said.
Mr. Clinton said the administration had taken too long to turn Iraq over to a U.N. peacekeeping force and he offered a possible explanation for the delay.“With the U.N. running it, Halliburton wouldn’t get their contract,” he said, referring the oil services firm Vice President Cheney once headed that has been awarded several American contracts to rebuild Iraq’s oil fields.
Mr. Clinton did praise President Bush for re-opening negotiations with North Korea and he urged Mr. Bush to enter into a non-aggression pact with the secretive Stalinist regime.
The former president was also drawn into a discussion about the Patriot Act, the federal anti-terrorism legislation the passed after September 11 attacks. Asked if the act had stepped over the line and abridged Americans’ constitutional rights,Mr.Clinton said,“It’s right close if it hasn’t.” He also expressed doubts about Mr.Bush’s decision to designate some individuals as enemy combatants and to place them in military custody. Mr. Clinton said it was difficult to justify requiring a person with family in America to be “rotting away in a jail cell somewhere” without recourse to the courts.
“We need to be really, really careful before we start denying whole categories of people the protections that make America worth living in,” he said.
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