A Missed Opportunity for Democrats

The latest obsession of the Right wing blogosphere is President Clinton's meltdown on Fox news. Apparently the question that pushed President Clinton into an extremely vigorous defense of his administration was "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?" The Right sees this as President Clinton coming unglued from a mixture of shameless egotism and a need to counter what Democrats perceive as the "Path to 9/11" propaganda from ABC. The Left sees this as President Clinton gallantly defending himself from yet another conservative smear campaign.

What really matters here is that President Clinton's shameless egotism has hurt the Democrats. Remember, this is an election season. That means that all Democrats, everywheres, should be excercising "message discipline" (insofar as Democrats actually have a message, that is). The interview question should have really gone like this:

Q: Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?

A: If I had had someone like Representative Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 1994, I would have had bin Laden's head on a silver platter. Vote Democrat.

In other words, whenever President Clinton would normally talk about himself, he should be talking about congressional Democrats instead. Good luck getting that to happen!