Slick Willie spoke and Wallace pissed his pants!
Bill Clinton: Nobody does it better
Posted by Frank James at 1:43 pm CDT
If I were Karl Rove or the Republican National Committee, I would pray former President Bill Clinton stays off television.
You just don’t want too many voters thinking that by voting for Democrats this November, they just might be voting for him.
If you haven’t seen Clinton’s performance during the interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, you really owe it to yourself. It was pure Clinton. Agree with him or not, he’s just incredibly entertaining, downright riveting to watch.
One of Clinton’s strengths is that he does passion really well (please, no Monica jokes.) He understands that as a politician you can have the facts on your side in a political argument all you want.
But if you can’t fire the emotions of voters, if you can’t get them to connect with you, you’re done for.
For weeks, for months, other Democrats have been making the same arguments Clinton did yesterday: that the war in Iraq distracted the U.S. from the effort to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, that the Clinton administration did act to get bin Laden, that Democrats have useful ideas about how to fight the war on terror, that Democrats are not wimps.
But nobody does it better than Clinton. In a matter of minutes he put across the Democratic talking points more effectively than the host of Democrats in Congress have managed to do.
And in that deft, Clintonesque way, he managed to criticize Republicans while giving a respectful shoutout to Karl Rove. He even broke down the Republican game plan like he was John Madden drawing the x’s and o’s.
WALLACE: Let's talk some politics. In that same New Yorker article, you say that you are tired of Karl Rove's B.S., though I'm cleaning up what you said.
CLINTON: But I do -- but I also say, I'm not tired of Karl Rove. I don't blame Karl Rove. He -- if you've got a deal that works, you just keep on doing it.
WALLACE: So what is the B.S.?
CLINTON: Well, every even-numbered year, right before an election, they come up with some security issue. In 2002, our party supported them in taking weapons inspections in Iraq, and was 100 percent for what happened in Afghanistan, and they didn't have any way to make us look like we didn't care about terror.
And so, they decided they would be for the homeland security bill that they had opposed, and they put a poison pill in it that we wouldn't pass, like taking the job rights away from 170,000 people, and then say that we were weak on terror if we weren't for it. They just ran that out.
This year, I think they wanted to make the questions of prisoner treatment and intercepted communications the same sort of issues, until John Warner and John McCain and Lindsey Graham got in there, and it turns out there were some Republicans that believed in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, and had their own ideas about how best to fight terror. The Democrats, as long as the American people believe that we take this seriously, and we have our own approaches, and we may have differences over Iraq, I think we'll do fine in this election.
But even if they agree with us about the Iraq war, we could be hurt by Karl Rove's new foray if we just don't make it clear that we too care about the security of the country. But we want to implement the 9/11 commission recommendations which they haven't for four years. We want to intensify our efforts in Afghanistan against bin Laden. We want to make America more energy independent. And then they can all, if they differ on Iraq, they say whatever they want on Iraq.
But Rove is good. And I honor him. I've always been amused at how good he is, in a way. But on the other hand, this is perfectly predictable. We're going to win a lot of seats if the American people aren't afraid. If they're afraid and we get divided again, then we may only win a few seats>
WALLACE: And the White House, the Republicans want to make the American people afraid?
CLINTON: Of course they do. Of course they do. They want us to be -- they want another homeland security deal. And they want to make it about, not about Iraq, but about some other security issue where, if we disagree with them, we are, by definition, imperiling the security of the country. And it's a big load of hooey. We've got nine Iraq war veterans running for the House seats. We've got President Reagan's secretary of the Navy is the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Virginia. A three-star admiral who was on my National Security Council staff, who also fought terror, by the way, is running for this seat of Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania.
We've got a huge military presence here in this campaign, and we just can't let them have some rhetorical device that puts us in a box we don't belong in. That's their job. Their job is to beat us. I like that about Rove. But our job is not to let him get away with it. And if they don't we will do fine.
Watching the “interview” was at times like watching a bear hunt in which the bear turns the tables. By the end of it, Clinton was pretty much picking Wallace’s bones clean. I think I even saw Clinton smacking his lips.
There was a moment when I almost felt sorry for Wallace before I remembered how much more he gets paid then I do. It was when Clinton kept telling Wallace to “Tell the truth, Chris.” It was like a scene from the OJ trial.
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