Author: terencef

When five former secretaries of state — three from Republican administrations and two from Democratic — sit down to give foreign policy advice to the next President in the midst of two wars and a heated campaign, sweet reason and unanimity is not guaranteed.

Include polar opposites like Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright in the mix, and the odds become longer.

Yet bipartisan consensus is what emerged this week at the University of Georgia, where I moderated the 16th Conference of Former Secretaries of State, produced by the Southern Center for International Studies, which will be broadcast on PBS next month. The roster included Colin Powell, James Baker and Warren Christopher, along with Kissinger and Albright.

All five agreed that the next President should close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and open a dialogue with Iran without preconditions. They also advocated a more pragmatic, open-minded approach to Pakistan, continued close ties with India, further efforts to engage China and a renewed push for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Guantanamo, they said, has become a blot on the U.S. reputation abroad. Even Kissinger, who said he had concerns about how to handle the inmates in the U.S. legal system, agreed that the camp should be closed.

Talking with Iran is essential, they said, because of the key role Iran plays in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. “One has to talk with adversaries,” said Kissinger, the man who forged the opening to China three decades ago. Colin Powell agreed, recalling the talks he conducted with Syria during his tenure in President George W. Bush’s first term. “They are not always pleasant visits,” he said, “but you have got to do it.”

The Secretaries agreed as well that the U.S. embargo against Cuba has failed and should be dropped. “When policies don’t work for 50 years,” said Warren Christopher, “it is time to think of something else. The audience of 2,300 at the Dean Rusk Center broke into applause.

Perhaps politics can stop at the water’s edge, after all.

Two of the best practitioners of the English language died this week: William F. Buckley Jr. and W.C. Heinz.

They could not have been more different writers.

Bill Buckley delighted in the complexities of the language; his erudite phrasing was over-the-top, but entertaining. Often he was just trying to score points over one of his adversaries on Firing Line. One of his favorite responses was: “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you actually believe what you are saying.”

Bill Heinz sought the simplicity of the language. As a newspaper reporter, distinguished war correspondent, sports columnist, freelance journalist and novelist, he wrote clean, spare prose, always trying to get to the essence. Hemingway was his hero and literary model. Once, when he had all but exhausted himself in writing a novel, his doctor told him: “Bill, if you don’t stop trying to be the greatest writer in the world, you’re going to kill yourself.” “I’m not trying to be the greatest writer in the world,” Bill answered. “I’m just trying to be the best writer I can be.”

In August, 2004, I spent an afternoon with Buckley at his lovely home overlooking Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut. I’d come with a producer and camera crew from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to interview him about his decision to step down from the National Review. I was there on business, but Buckley could not have been more gracious and welcoming. He showed us around, invited us to share lunch, played his harpsichord for us and acted as though there was nothing he would rather do with his afternoon.

Buckley had converted an adjacent barn into an office. In the middle, all-but-hidden by memorabilia and books and files and clutter, was his computer. He was going to continue writing his newspaper column, he said, because it gave him three kinds of satisfaction. “One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”

Bill Heinz was an equally gracious host. He was a close friend of my father, the late sports columnist Red Smith, and I grew up listening to the two of them trade stories in the Heinz home or ours. My father recalled one time when he was in Cuba visiting Bill’s literary hero at his Finca Vigia, just outside Havana. Hemingway had just read Bill’s first novel, The Professional, about a prize fighter, and was full of praise for it.

“But damn,” Hemingway said of the main character, “I didn’t want Bill’s fighter to lose.” “You didn’t want him to lose?” my father said, incredulously. “How about Bill? When he started the book, he knew how he had to end it. But after he wrote the first line leading into the fight, he had to take a day off and walk in the woods to get up the courage to have his fighter knocked out.”

For Bill Heinz, writing was a contact sport.

“It is time to get real — get real about how we actually win this election,” Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York this week. “it is time to get real about the challenges facing America.”

“Get real,” is her new mantra.

The unspoken subtext is “don’t get your hopes up, don’t let charisma carry you away, don’t fall prey to that inspirational elixir Obama is selling.”

“Get real.” How lame is that as a rallying cry for a struggling campaign? It is such a downbeat, eat-your peas message. Which of her highly-paid advisers came up with that? It reinforces her negative image as an admonishing, lecturing, know-it-all.

Hillary Clinton may still pull off victories in Texas or Ohio on March 4. It is always a mistake to count out a Clinton in a campaign before the votes are in. And the reporters who are writing her political obituaries are getting dangerously ahead of the story.

But this much is already true about Clinton-for-President in ’08: it was her bad luck to have to compete against a candidate whose story is even more remarkable than hers.

She stood out against the Bidens and Dodds and Richardsons — all credible, conventional candidates — as the first woman frontrunner in a presidential race. But Barak Obama stands out even more, as a symbol of the nation’s deepest division and as individual who can help bridge that gap.

Obama is more than that, of course. He is enormously articulate and blessed with a dignified composure and inner calm that has carried him through 19 debates without a serious stumble. He also has a sense of humor, which helps.

He seems to have a near-perfect pitch when it comes to gauging the public mood. He senses, for example, that voters are sick and tired of the politics of character assassination. When Clinton attacks, striking out in last night’s debate with a crack about “change you can Xerox,” he shakes his head and turns the other cheek. Smart politics. She looks tough; he looks presidential.

It is Hillary’s fate that when she finally gets her chance at the brass ring, a truly different candidate is there to take it — and her specialness — away from her.

Having read the New York Times’ page-one piece this morning about John McCain’s alleged involvement with a young woman lobbyist during his 2000 campaign, and Bill Keller’s defense of it and The New Republic’s frothy story-behind-the-story, I can only conclude that the paper must be on very solid grounds.

I say this not because I know the inside story here — I don’t.

I say it because there is no way that a smart editor like Keller would go with a story based on two unnamed sources — former McCain aides now disaffected from him and his campaign — unless he had somehow independently satisfied himself that what they said was true.

He wouldn’t take their word for it. His reporters must have come up with corroborating support from others. The cost to him and the paper would be too great if it was wrong. He knew going in that this was going to provoke a firestorm.

The thrust of the report is simple: the two former aides say they went to John McCain and warned him that if he continued to be seen frequently with Vicki Iseman, a young, blonde lobbyist 30 years his junior, it was going to jeopardize his presidential ambitions. The Times’ story also quoted John Weaver, a close McCain confidant, as saying that he met with Ms Iseman at a café in Union Station and urged her to stay away from the Senator.

Today Senator McCain said that he had not been cautioned by aides about appearing with Ms Iseman, whose clients included telecommunications firms with important business before McCain’s Commerce Committee, and had never had an improper relationship with her. He also said he did not know of Mr. Weaver’s reported contacts with Ms. Iseman.

So there it sits as of this writing.

The New Republic, incidentally, has almost nothing to support its lighter-than-air account of the newsroom debates over the story at The Times prior to publication. Of course there was debate prior to running such a story. The suggestion that The Times would feel forced to run the piece because of The New Republic’s queries is silly.

That was the least of their worries

Eugene Robinson, arguably the best columnist writing in America today, posed a two-part question in his column this morning in The Washington Post:

“Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators… basically in the tank for Barack Obama?”

Gene’s answer: no and no.

My view: yes and yes.

The coverage of Hillary during this campaign has been across-the-board critical, especially since she began losing after New Hampshire. She may have brought much of the negative reporting on herself, sometimes with the help of her husband. Able and articulate as she is, Hillary can be as polarizing among the media as she is with the public.

And her campaign has taken the tough-love approach with the reporters who cover it, frequently ostracizing those they think are critical or hostile. That kind of aggressive press-relations strategy may sometimes be justified, but it rarely effective. Reporters are supposed to be objective and professional. But they are human. They resent the cold shoulder, even if they understand the campaign’s motivation.

The result is coverage that is viscerally harsh: her laugh is often described as a “cackle.” Her stump speech is dismissed as dry and tiresomely programmatic. She is accused of projecting a sense of entitlement, as though the presidency should be hers by default, that it is somehow now her turn to be president. When she makes changes in her campaign hierarchy, she is described as “desperate.”

Chris Matthews argues on MSNBC that Hillary “bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people — like maybe me on occasion.” Further, he has theorized that she has got as far as she has as a candidate only because of a sympathy vote, because “her husband messed around.”

Is that misogynistic? Perhaps. Is it unfair? Probably. Is it crude? Of course. Is Chris on to something? Maybe.

But whatever the case, Hillary and her supporters have reason to complain about the tone of their press notices, if not the substance. Of course, when a front-runner begins to stumble, the coverage is always more critical. And reporters are as subject to Clinton-fatigue as anyone else. But the attacks on Hillary have seemed over-the-top in recent weeks. A barely-suppressed glee often creeps into the commentary when Hillary loses another primary or caucus.

By contrast, has the coverage of Obama been overly sympathetic? Have reporters romanticized the junior Senator from Illinois? Have they glamorized him and his wife? Did they exaggerate the significance of Ted Kennedy’s endorsement? Have they given him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his meager experience?

Of course they have.

His rise to front-runner is described as meteoric, his speeches as mesmerizing, his crowds as enraptured, his charisma as boundless. Obama is characterized as the second-coming of JFK, etc. etc. It is all a bit much.

What is behind this enthusiasm? It is not so much personal preference or political bias. It is this: Reporters love a good story, and Obamamania is as good as they come. There has not been such drama and excitement in a presidential race in years. Reporters are suckers for a story that writes itself.

Last summer, the astute National Journal reporter Carl Cannon argued in an Aspen Institute panel that the media were missing the significance of Obama’s candidacy, failing to grasp the inherent newsworthiness of his rise from obscurity to the national scene. Carl was right then, but nobody is missing it now, and the result is coverage that is often just short of gushing.

In the end, the contrasting tone of the reporting in the Democratic race may not determine the outcome. But it will influence it. Bill Clinton is right when he angrily protests that “the political press has avowedly played a role in this election.”

In his frustration and fury, Clinton probably doesn’t understand the real motivation or comprehend what is behind the critical coverage of his wife and the fawning, sometimes cheerleading reporting of the Obama phenomenon.

But he is on to something.

So, what do the first caucuses and primaries tell us about the last glass ceiling in American Presidential politics?

Is it race, as some surmise after New Hampshire? Is it gender, as some concluded after Iowa? Is it both?

Or do the results demonstrate that neither is meaningful anymore?

Women outvoted men 57-43 per cent in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but with opposite results. In Iowa, they broke for Obama by 35-30 per cent, and arguably, gave him the victory. In New Hampshire, the state with the second highest percentage of women in its legislature (nearly 36 per cent,) they went strongly for Clinton by 46-29 per cent, more than enough to give her the margin.

Conclusion? Memo to the media: take nothing for granted.

Neither state of course, has a large bloc of African-American voters. We will have to wait for South Carolina and other states to see how the black vote actually breaks in a 2008 presidential primary. Again, media, take nothing for granted.

When it comes to voting, as in sports, the differences between men and women are more telling than between whites and blacks. Rightly or wrongly, men hold women to a different, more demanding standard when judging whether they are fit for the presidency.

Whether they admit it or not, men ask whether a woman candidate for the White House has the strength and emotional stability to face down a major international threat, or stand up to the demands of the job. They rarely ask such a question about a male candidate — if the issue arises with a man, he is toast, anyway.

Hence the fuss over Hillary’s emotional moment in the diner in New Hampshire, and in the Manchester debate, when she admitted to hurt feelings over the question of whether she makes the grade in “likability.” The primary results suggest that many women found those to be humanizing moments. Some men probably saw them as signs of emotional weakness.

It was a classic demonstration of the unique dilemma women face in running for national office. They have to be demonstrably tough, but not excessively so; visibly human, but not vulnerably so.

When it comes to race, the issues are more subtle. A quarter-century ago, Tom Bradley, then the mayor of Los Angeles, clearly was hurt in his gubernatorial loss to George Deukmajian by racial considerations.

Will the “Bradley factor” apply to Obama this year? There was little-to-no evidence of it in Iowa or New Hampshire. Remarkably, race did not seem to be an issue.

But, yet again, take nothing for granted. There are surely many American voters who, in the privacy of the booth, won’t pull a lever for an African-American, any African-American for president. Similarly, there are voters who will specifically support Obama because of his race, feeling that the moment is long overdue.

No doubt there are also voters, mostly men, but women, too, who flat-out won’t vote for a woman for president. And we already have seen that, at least in New Hampshire, women will come out in unusual numbers to support a female candidate.

What we don’t know at this point is, plus-and-minus, how many such voters there may be. They are not likely to level with pollsters about it.

But we are about to learn when they actually vote. Unlike any race before, this year’s presidential contest is going to demonstrate whether and which glass are ceilings still in place in American politics.

If the past truly is prologue, then you can find a detailed roadmap to a future Hillary Clinton administration, should there be one, in the pages of Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, “For Love of Politics.”
In 450 pages, Smith dissects the unique political and personal partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “Two for the price of One,” was Bill’s half-joking campaign slogan in 1992, and that is indeed just what the country got for the next eight years.
Hillary was more than First Lady; she was first counselor in every important appointment and decision over the course of two terms. It was a co-presidency, in which Bill and Hill depended on each other in bad times as well as good.
At times, Smith writes, Hillary was out front, as in the health care debacle. At other times, she was the “hidden hand” behind her husband’s major initiatives. Staffers in the Clinton White House referred to her as “the supreme court,” who would have the final say on the most controversial matters.
Even during and after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill relied on Hillary for strength, guidance and redemption. Hillary could hardly have been surprised by her husband’s dalliance — he had been off the reservation repeatedly during their long marriage — but she was offended when he lied to her and furious at the embarrassment it caused their daughter, Chelsea.
Nonetheless, she not only forgave him, she strategized on his defense against impeachment proceedings and worked with him in the foreign policy arena to rebuild his reputation. Smith makes it clear that this had been Hillary’s M.O. for decades when it came to her husband’s philandering. Their joint political career and ambitions required nothing less.
So it is safe to assume that this partnership would continue to function under “Madam President” Clinton, if she prevails next November. Bill will be without formal portfolio — the nepotism law prohibits it — but he will be an essential player in every important decision. It will be a third Clinton term and, conceivably, a fourth.

The charming, historic town of Annapolis is quiet again, now that the President, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and the representatives of 40 other nations have had their one-day conference and headed back to Washington. Those of us who live nearby can drive downtown again and sailboats can cruise alongside the Naval Academy campus, all of which was off-limits while the world’s top diplomats were here.
So what was accomplished, other than hearing the President mangle the pronunciation of the names of his two new best friends, Ehud Olmert of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine? What remains after the photo op?
Quite a lot, actually. The Israeli and Palestinian leaders have committed themselves publicly and formally to begin sustained, face-to-face, bi-lateral negotiations of all the important issues that divide them. These include the final-status questions like the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem and the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and whether exiled Palestinians have the right to return to their former homes or be compensated for them. The goal is a peace treaty within a year.
“The time has come” Ehud Olmert said repeatedly to address all these issues without pre-conditions or forbidden topics. “We Palestinians are ready,” said Mahmoud Abbas. The first talks are to be held in two weeks.
That is no small achievement, even if the outcome is far from certain. Certainly the world has waited long enough. It was 60 years ago this month that the partition of Palestine was adopted by the United Nations, 30 years ago when President Anwar Sadat made his journey to Jerusalem, 40 years ago this year that Israel occupied the West Bank.
The irony is that the talks should begin now, when Olmert is at a low ebb in the public opinion polls in Israel, Abbas controls only a part of Palestine and Bush is in his final year in office. Perhaps it was the very weakness of the three that propelled them to take big risks politically to try to restore their standing.
The choice of Annapolis as a conference venue was interesting. Of course it is handy to Washington and the Naval Academy is a secure site where the President could chopper in and out for his three-hour foray into high-stakes diplomacy.
But it has history going for it, too. In 1786, it was the site of the Annapolis Convention, where delegates from five states gathered to hammer out thorny trade and commerce issues. That led to the historic Constitutional Convention that convened in Philadelphia the following year and wrote our national charter.
Big things can happen when people gather here.

I am scheduled to join Howard Kurtz on his weekly media criticism broadcast Reliable Sources at 10:30 EST tomorrow on CNN.
The crisis before us? Will NBC’s Brian Williams trash his reputation and journalism by anchoring Saturday Night Live later tonight? I suspect he will do neither. The public can easily distinguish between the Brian Williams who plays it straight on the Nightly News, and the Brian Williams who plays it for laughs on SNL Those who know him, recognize Williams as a genuinely funny guy with a marvelous, self-deprecatory sense of humor.
I, for one, will still respect him in the morning.

MURDOCH’S JOURNAL

Now that he’s got it, the time has come to take Rupert Murdoch at his word.

He has said that he intends to build up The Wall Street Journal, not dumb it down. He has said that he will strengthen the Washington bureau, not reduce it through layoffs and buyouts, as so many other publishers are doing. He says he wants more coverage of politics and government, more international news, more reporters on big stories, more inter-action between the paper and its website, more synergy with broadcast outlets, more imagination on page one.

Bring it on, Rupert. It is a great opportunity to prove your critics wrong. And frankly, The Journal could use all of the above. It is good today, but not great, not nearly as bright and original as it used to be.

And that editorial page? It is the most predictable, knee-jerk, reactionary opinion column in America. You may agree with its positions, Rupert, but even you have to admit that its view of the world is so distorted by idealogy that it rarely judges events or people on the merits. Shake it up, surprise us with new columnists with a range of views, re-design it to draw readers in, not drive them away.

You have talked about selling off Dow Jones’ smaller newspapers and some of its other assets. That is an owner’s privilege. But what will you do with the cash? You could use it to buy down debt and pay off the Bancroft Family’s expenses.

But if you take the money and plough it back into the product, if you seize the opportunity to challenge the New York Times in foreign and national coverage, if you enhance the website and make it free, if you demonstrate that a newspaper, yes a newspaper, can find new ways to make money, then you will have done the world a favor, as well as yourself.

Go ahead, Rupert, prove that you are not the hack your critics say you are.

You’ll enjoy the last, best laugh.