I don’t want to belabor the point, but Bill Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace — the former president’s first-ever chat with Fox News — has become one of the more interesting political showdowns in quite a while.
If you were out of the loop over the weekend, Clinton sat down with Wallace, ostensibly to discuss the Clinton Global Initiative. As this video and this transcript demonstrate, the interview became a heated discussion about Clinton’s counter-terrorism efforts as president.
Some of Clinton’s far-right critics have suggested that the former president somehow lost his cool. Nonsense. Watch the clip. Clinton certainly felt strongly about the subject at hand, but his responses were forceful and factual. Every word was not only true, but an assertive, detailed response to conservative propaganda.
Indeed, Clinton’s office had some good advice to Dems who caught the interview.
“CGI is a nonpartisan event, and so we thought it would be fair to do Fox News Sunday… When Wallace hid behind his viewers and attacked President Clinton’s record on terror, President Clinton fought back hard, just like any Democrat should when they are attacked with a baseless attack,” said Clinton spokesman Jay Carson.
The Note referred to this today as the “Chappaqua Hint,” meaning that Clinton’s forceful response was meant “to set an example for how [Clinton aides] want the party to behave between now and Election Day.”
I can only hope so.
A few other Clinton v. Wallace notes to consider:
* From today’s Progress Report:
Clinton pressed Wallace on why he had never asked the Bush administration why it demoted Clarke. Wallace claimed “we asked” and shot back, “a href=”http://thinkprogress.org/clinton-interview”>Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday, sir?” In fact, a Progress Report analysis found that, since 2001, Wallace has interviewed the top national security officials from the Bush administration — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hadley — 42 times. According to a Lexis-Nexis database search, he never asked any of them why Clarke was demoted, nor did he ask why they failed to respond to the USS Cole attack. Days after it was revealed that President Bush had received a President’s Daily Brief that said “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.,” Wallace did not even bring it up in an interview with former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
* After the interview aired, Wallace suggested he was physically frightened of Clinton.
In an interview yesterday with MediaBistro.com, Mr. Wallace noted that Mr. Clinton is “a very big man” and that he thought the former president was trying to intimidate him by getting angry.
“As he leaned forward — wagging his finger in my face and then poking the notes I was holding — I felt as if a mountain was coming down in front of me,” Mr. Wallace said.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Wallace was, what, afraid Clinton would beat him up?
* And Glenn Greenwald had a good item about the conservative talking point blaming Clinton’s handling of Somalia for the growth of al Qaeda. Clinton explained the issue to Wallace, but as Greenwald noted, “If anything, Clinton understated his own defense.”
Ultimately, I don’t imagine Clinton will be going back onto Fox News anytime soon, but all in all, I’m delighted he did this interview and said what needed to be said.