Contrast Bill Clinton’s excruciating dialogue with MTV viewers not so long ago with Colin Powell’s masterful, engaged colloquy. No boxers or briefs questions. No attempt to pander shamelessly for votes. Just a principled and effective defense of America’s role in the world to a global generation that desperately needs to hear it. According to the New York Times today,
[w]hen Ida Norheim-Hagtun, 19, of Norway, asked about America’s being seen as Satan, Secretary Powell said that, “far from being the great Satan, I would say we are the great protector.” He said the United States had rebuilt Europe and Japan after World War II, defeated Communism and fascism and that “the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead.”
That’s a home run. I was also proud of him for not kowtowing to the crazy notion, still fostered by paleocons, that somehow using condoms won’t impede the spread of HIV. Of course they’re not perfect. I’m the last person to claim they are. But they’re an essential part of any attempt to restrain transmission in the developing world. Even more amazing was his calm and candid exploration of the explosive matter of “blackness:”
Natalie Cofield, 20, an information- systems major at Howard, also drew a sober response when she asked the secretary why he had suggested he was not “that black.”
“Because I am not that black as a physical matter,” he replied, adding: “I’m as black as anybody whose skin could be 20 shades darker. I consider myself an African-American, a black man, proud of it, proud to stand on the shoulders of those who went before me.”
Because of his military background and upbringing in an interracial neighborhood in the Bronx, Secretary Powell added, “I’m probably more acceptable to the white power structure that I was dealing with when I was coming up.” But, he noted, Jim Crow laws were not a historical footnote for him. “I’ve been thrown out of places because I was just black enough not to be served,” he said.
I’m usually not a Powell booster. I disagree with some of his judgments on international relations and foreign policy. But in this instance, all the hype is justified. What an amazing asset the United States has in its dealings with the wider world.
MACULATE CONCEPTION: A razor-sharp piece by Jeff Morley in Slate on liberal interest group reaction to a recent Bush HHS proposal. The Bush administration at the end of last month announced a dramatic extension of federally-supported health-care for poor pregnant women. To sweeten this liberal pill for its own constituency, the administration put in the small print that the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which currently covers children from birth to age 19, would now define children as any living being from conception onward. The left had a cow, declaring, as they do every fifteen minutes or so, that abortion was in imminent danger of being made illegal. Jeff is right to point out that one of the reasons groups like NARAL do this is not because it’s true (it obviously isn’t) but because without these scare tactics, their direct mail fundraising dries up. The result is that the Bushies have successfully occupied the center-ground on abortion, while cleverly marginalizing the interest group left. It’s the same mistake that PFAW have made by describing Charles Pickering as a latter day Goebbels. Good for Morley for presenting a saner liberal position.
THE EUROPEAN RIFT: Sane piece by David Ignatius today in the Post, reiterating many of the arguments made in this space, by Tom Friedman, and others. Ignatius is right that Europeans simply don’t get the depth of the change in the American psyche since September 11. They can be forgiven for that. Some Americans haven’t absorbed it either. He’s also right that Americans too easily forget that Europe itself has had much experience with terrorism. I grew up in a country where half the cabinet had to be dug out of rubble in a hotel explosion in Brighton. It doesn’t help America’s case now that some Americans actually financed this war on a fellow democracy for years. Even today, you can’t find a single trash-can on a London street – they’re too easy to plant bombs in. At the same time, the simple truth is that no terrorist event in the history of Europe’s recent past can be compared to 9/11. The difference is simply one of scale and ambition. If a similar event had occurred in London or Paris, they would be singing a different tune today – and desperate for America’s help. So I have limited patience with their quibbles. They actually have nothing comparable to talk about, and their success in appeasing terrorists is the best argument yet for Bush’s zero-tolerance policy. the Europeans should also be smart enough to realize that they could be next. This is not time to start whining about American global power. If it weren’t for American global power, al Qaeda would be busy destroying key European cities as we speak.
The Dish 