Saturday, March 22, 2008

In Bill's Defense    [Kathleen Parker]

It isn’t often that I’m called to defend Bill Clinton, but since I was present in Charlotte, N.C., Friday when he made the remarks — now being spun by the Obama campaign as “like McCarthy” — I’m compelled to set the record straight.

The AP is reporting that Hillary Clinton is trying to clarify comments by her husband that “seemed to question” Barack Obama’s patriotism and that an Obama aide likened to Joseph McCarthy. Nonsense.

In no way did I interpret Clinton’s remarks as questioning Obama’s patriotism. Clinton was making the case for his wife’s electability against McCain, who last time I checked is the presumptive Republican nominee and her challenger should she win the Democratic nomination. He may have intentionally bypassed Obama in his leap to match Hillary against McCain, but he didn’t say anything that could be construed as questioning Obama’s patriotism. The sequence went as follows: He noted that Hillary polls ahead of McCain in Ohio and Florida and also that McCain leads “Hillary’s opponent” (I quit typing here and don’t recall exactly which states he mentioned in that part of his comment.) His point, obviously, was that Hillary should be the nominee and, in that case, she and McCain would face each other in the final contest.

Before he made the so-called controversial remarks, he praised McCain as an “honorable man,” who has “paid the highest price short of giving your life.” He mentioned that though Hillary and McCain disagree on many issues, they’ve worked together successfully on others. In that context, he said it would be great “if you had two people who really love this country and ask who’s right on these issues” instead of all the non-essential clutter that now distracts in politics.

This was toward the end of his talk, which focused on Iraq and the economy. Obama was no longer on the radar at this point. Bill Clinton was saying that Hillary and McCain are both good patriots who love their country, not that all those unmentioned are something else. At least that’s the way I heard it. Now, if I were the sort of reporter who looks for some random sentence to blow up into an attention-grabbing headline . . .

03/22 12:03 PMShare