Legacies Don't Matter

Friday, September 29, 2006

By Chuck Raasch, USA Today

September 28, 2006

WASHINGTON — For Americans right now, nothing could be more diversionary, meaningless or dangerous than the suddenly fierce debate between the Bush and Clinton camps over who is most to blame for not preventing the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
If you believe half of the code-red rhetoric about the gathering threats to the country, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Debate II that erupted over the past week has been worse than a distraction. It is a division in the midst of a war. Blame games are the toxic tailings of a 24-hour talking head culture that can only thrive on divisions. What we are witnessing is tantamount to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his predecessors playing a Pearl Harbor blame game on the rollup to D-Day.

This is also not 1998, but a lot of our leaders seem to be reverting to it. This is not about a president and an intern in the Oval Office but a threat from Islamic fundamentalists willing to destroy civilization to remake it in their own narrow view of the way all of us should live.

Bill Clinton's legacy, which obviously matters very much to him and always will, really has nothing to do with confronting global terrorism as it exists today. George W. Bush professes to not caring about his legacy, and whether you believe that or not, the assertion is not essential to fighting the terrorist threat going forward, except for how it frames the next step in Iraq. What is important, if you believe the jihadists-are-coming tone of the National Intelligence Estimate report, is what unity we can muster to prevent the next 9/11.

The surprising thing about this latest eruption is that for much of Bush's presidency, he and Clinton had largely detoured around the blame game, even though the 9/11 Commission found fault with both men, and the harshest partisans have been chewing over the question for five years. Until Mount Clinton erupted this past week, he and Bush seemed confined within the fraternity of presidents and ex-presidents. Reading six or eight years of the daily threat reports would have a tendency to create a natural sympathy for the man in the Oval Office that the rest of us could not understand.

Indeed, when Clinton was pushing his autobiography two years ago, he opined how "unanticipated events" ultimately defined a presidency, and he put 9/11 in that category.

"When I ran for president, I didn't dream that within a year I'd be dealing with what happened in Somalia," Clinton told Time magazine in June of 2004. "George Bush certainly didn't believe he'd be dealing with 9/11."

Clinton talked differently in his interview with Fox's Chris Wallace last week. Defending his attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, Clinton said this of Bush: "They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried." A day later, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said her husband "would have taken ... more seriously" pre-9/11 threat reports than Bush did.

This blame-game has roots in a fictionalized documentary of campaign tactics that are likely to do little to reassure Americans that this war is being fought and won the American way. Clintonites are angry about an ABC account of 9/11 they say unfairly depicted Clinton as distracted and indifferent to a gathering threat. In firing back, they've sought to push all the blame to Bush.

Meanwhile, some Republicans in this campaign season have equated honest policy differences with being unpatriotic and cowardly. Democrats rightly claim they should be able to talk about a new direction in Iraq without being labeled Benedict Arnolds.

Ex-9/11 Commission member Tim Roemer, who once served as a moderate Democrat in Congress, told ABC news that "both the Bush and Clinton administrations made mistakes. They tried, and they made mistakes. We need to move forward. We need to fix problems."

This country sure could use a Clinton-Bush handshake. But we are in election season — the season of wedge politics and of stoking the angry. It's a legacy no one should want to claim.

Contact GNS Political Writer Chuck Raasch at craasch@gns.gannett.com.

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