Former President Bill Clinton’s guest shot on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Wednesday evening included interesting observations on President Bush’s “brain” and one of its exploits.
King: Do you respect Karl Rove?
Clinton: Absolutely. Yes, I think old Karl’s out there stirring, trying to get Hillary an opponent now. You know, he’s good at what he does.
But, you know, he’ll stir around on you. And he’s smart. He’s smart as a whip. And he’ll think things through. And — but I think that, you know, we’ve made it a little easy for him on a couple of these elections. In 2002, I thought — that was maybe one of his most brilliant achievements, the 2002 congressional elections. Because I think he was largely responsible for the fact that, you know, the Americans were concerned about security.
It was shortly after 9-11, but they also thought the White House was too far to the right, and they wanted a correction. And were inclined to vote for more Democrats for Congress. But they really supported the president on 9-11 and how he handled Afghanistan and terror.
And so they said, “Well, what are we going to do?” Two-thirds of the Democrats were for Iraq, 100 percent were for Afghanistan. How are we going to make them look weak on security? That’s the only way because we don’t agree with them on the domestic issues.
So, they come up with this Homeland Security bill, which the president had opposed for eight and-a-half months. All of a sudden they decided they’re for the bill. Then, the next day, if you’re not for it you’re Saddam Hussein’s ally. And they beat Max Cleland, you know, who was profoundly wounded in Vietnam, and a lot of other people.
But I think that’s our fault. We let them get away with that. We’ve got to learn to stand up engage in those debates.
This begs the question, why didn’t Democrats saturate the airwaves last year with ads branding George W. Bush the flip-flopper he is? As in, “He was against the Homeland Security bill before he was suddenly, self-servingly, for it.”
It is not quite that simple. Bush was careful to state that his only reservation about the bill was that it lacked a waiver of union rules for some jobs.