Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Kristol Klear

Monday, April 16, 2001

Let me start out by saying Bill Kristol does not need me to defend him. In fact, he doesn't need defending at all.

Kristol, who is the publisher of The Weekly Standard, was Mr. Everywhere this past week because of his opposition to President Bush's handling of the Hainan Issue. The networks and much of the traditional popular media loved having Kristol casting the first stone at the Bush Administration, so they didn't have to, and thereby risking the ire of their viewers or readers.

Since well before starting the Standard (which is owned by Rupert Murdock's News Corportation, or, at least, that's the copyright notice on its web page) Bill liked to present himself as the keeper of the flame of the Intellectual Right.

The word "Right" might well, to Bill's way of thinking, be considered proper in both its usages here.

To Bill's credit he succeeded in making The Weekly Standard required reading in Washington to see what was doing among Conservatives, displacing, in a shockingly brief period of time, R. Emmett Tyrrell's "American Spectator" magazine which previously held that position.

Kristol is not in this Bush Administration and has no reason to defend it out-of-hand. Even when he WAS in a Bush Administration, as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief-of-staff, he was not always known as a person who would defend Administration policy out-of-hand.

In this instance, I believe Bill Kristol is wrong. But I don't necessarily think he is wrong for the wrong reasons.

I think there is an inherent danger in, as Kristol appears to be doing, finding fault with diplomatic nuance and subtlety by deriding it as a sign of national weakness.

There is significant evidence that the government in Beijing was initially misled by the military commanders on the ground on Hainan and so reacted, in the first hours, more vigorously than they might otherwise have.

There is a reason that Chinese President Jiang Zemin did not return from his trip to South America and Cuba to oversee the handling of this incident. Once the Chinese government realized their position was somewhere between weak and non-existent, Jiang needed that most precious of Head-of-State prerogatives: Plausible Deniability.

Premier Zhu Rongji was reported to have been out of Beijing for much, if not most, of the 12-day period to give him some breathing room as well.

On our side President Bush provided the background direction and allowed the diplomats to handle the details. One such detail is the fact that we never sent a letter to China in anything but English so the required form of the word "apology" in Chinese - which the Chinese were demanding - could not be an issue.

That, it appears to me, is an example of nuance and subtlety; not national weakness.

The President is getting high marks from almost everyone else on his handling of this first foreign policy test. A Newsweek poll released over the weekend showed the public approved by a 3-1 margin: 69% to 23%.

Unlike Mr. Clinton, President Bush does not, apparently, feel the need to insert himself personally into every issue, every day. President Clinton's well-documented, if under-developed, sense of self required constant, positive, renewal for which this type of incident was perfectly suited.

Is there anyone in the class who disagrees with this statement? Had Bill Clinton still been President, he would have been hosting Easter dinner yesterday at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.

In other poll stuff, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel released the results of a study which found that 63 percent of Floridians think the George W. Bush victory there was "entirely" legitimate. 22 percent thought it was "somewhat" legit and 14 percent said it was "not at all" legitimate.

The Sun-Sentinel's pollster chose to collapse the "somewhats" and "not at alls" into a 63-36 result. I choose to put it this way:

"85 percent of those polled think the Bush victory was at least somewhat legitimate. Only a tiny percentage - 14 percent - think it was "not at all" legitimate.

See the Sun-Sentinel article as well as a sweet Catchy Caption on the Secret Decoder Ring.

The remaining one percent was at Sanderson's Deli for the Early Bird and declined to participate. One unidentified man threatened a pollster with a piece of pot roast which he claimed was not exactly the leanest piece of meat that ever came out of a cow."

Another piece of that same poll shows Governor Jeb Bush - who is being sold by the Democrats as being in huge, gigantic, overwhelming political trouble - is sitting on a 56 percent approval rating and beats his three most oft-mentioned rivals in theoretical head-to-head match-ups by between 14 and 22 points.

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