Discriminations

The New York Times today examines Hillary’s vaunted “experience” as First Lady, quoting some former administration officials who argue it was extensive and relevant and others who argue that it was neither.

This is not a question that greatly concerns me, but I found two items in the article that were provocative. First, and most relevant in my view to the current campaign, was her response when she was asked to cite “a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s”:

Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”

I wonder how “showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives” — “diversity” as a basis for foreign and military policy — would have removed the Taliban from Afghanistan, Saddam from Iraq, etc.

Perhaps some people would like this to be the leading “object lesson” from the 1990s that we would like our next president to have learned, but I’m not one of them.

Almost as interesting, but no doubt of less current importance, is the question addressed here of whether Mrs. Clinton, as First Lady, had access to highly classified material and information.

Mrs. Clinton said in the interview that she was careful not to overstep her bounds on national security, relying instead on informal access....

She said she did not attend National Security Council meetings, nor did she have a security clearance — though she was briefed on classified intelligence before going on some important diplomatic trips....

Mrs. Clinton declined to say if she ever read the President’s Daily Brief, a rundown of the latest intelligence and threats to national security provided to the president each day. “I would put that in the category of I-never-talk-about-what-I-talk-to-my-husband-about,” she said. But she indicated, and other administration officials confirmed, that Mr. Clinton would sometimes talk to her about contents of the briefing.

Really? President Clinton talked to her about the contents of the PDB, even though she did not have a security clearance? Some of you may recall the sturm and drang surrounding President Bush’s reluctance to share his PDBs even with the 9/11 Commission. As national security expert Thomas Blanton wrote back in 2004:

The PDB is the CIA’s top-of-the-line product, a secret intelligence report prepared each morning for the president. Ari Fleischer, the former White House spokesman, has called the PDB “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government.” Vice President Dick Cheney has called it “the family jewels.” Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency, has called it “sacrosanct” and “something you never, ever share.” Even the commission’s chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, has said, “To make those available to an outside group is something that no other president has done in our history.” After much sturm und drang, a compromise was worked out allowing three commission members and the staff director to see the originals of the PDBs from the Bush and Clinton years and then write up a summary for their peers.

Although Blanton thought this view of the PDB was “far too restrictive,” the proper view of the PDB would seem to be restrictive enough that sharing it routinely with someone without security clearance would at least raise some eyebrows.

Isn’t sharing even less sensitive classified information with someone not authorized to receive it what got Scooter Libby in trouble?