Inside Politics

Blame Gorelick?

September 11 commission member Jamie Gorelick, as deputy attorney general for three years beginning in 1994, “was an architect of the government’s self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts,” writes Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others.

“That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail,” Mr. McCarthy said in an opinion piece at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“To hear Gorelick lecture witnesses about intelligence lapses is breathtaking,” he added.

Monday-morning QB

Laying blame for missed clues that could have signaled the September 11, 2001, attacks is “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” says Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was New York’s mayor at the time.

“For any one thing to jump out, you almost have to know what’s going to happen in the future,” said Mr. Giuliani, who is to testify next month before the government commission investigating the terrorist attacks.

“And now, we do know what happened in the future. So if you see a document that says, ’al Qaeda anything,’ it’s a lot more important than it was back then. Back then, al Qaeda fit into thousands of other pieces of information.”

Mr. Giuliani told the Associated Press in an interview yesterday he had not seen or heard any intelligence that could have prompted the government to react differently than it did.

Write fast, Bill

Some top Democrats are growing nervous that former President Bill Clinton’s memoirs will arrive in bookstores just in time to overshadow John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the New York Times reports.

“Many Democrats said they wanted the book published as far as possible before the election and, certainly, before the Democratic national convention in late July. They fear that the book will embolden Mr. Clinton’s foes to turn out and vote for President Bush,” reporters Jim Rutenberg and David D. Kirkpatrick said.

“Mr. Clinton, for his part, has increased the nervous speculation about the book in Democratic circles by making a habit of picking up the phone to regale friends with long passages and even chapters of his prose. Mixing boyish enthusiasm with a craving for approval, people who have received the calls said, he has proudly narrated excerpts about everything from college antics with his pals at Georgetown to his 1995 standoff with Republicans that led to a government shutdown.”

Mr. Clinton promised party Chairman Terry McAuliffe that the book would be released well before the convention’s opening day, July 26, the newspaper said.

However, Dick Morris, who was Mr. Clinton’s chief campaign strategist in 1996, doubts that the former president will make his deadline.

“I wouldn’t bet on it coming out during the campaign,” Mr. Morris told the reporters. “He takes a long time to finish things and he’s never happy, and he fills up the waste basket. …

“What I really believe is if he were to come out with it during the campaign, it would be intended as a way of undercutting Kerry.”

Thanks, Jimmy

Have no fear, Democrats: Jimmy Carter says things are looking up.

“I’ve been involved in national politics now for more than 25 years. But this year we will see the Democratic Party more united than ever before in my memory, and even the earlier history that I studied before my life began,” Mr. Carter tells the American Prospect magazine in an online interview.

Some Democrats may recall from “earlier history” that Mr. Carter led his party to disaster in 1980, when he lost by 8 million votes to Ronald Reagan in a landslide that helped Republicans gain control of the Senate as well.

“I think we’re completely united with a determination to replace the Bush administration and its fundamentalist, right-wing philosophy with the more moderate qualities that have always exemplified what our nation is: a nation committed to strength in the military,” Mr. Carter said in the interview.

“I served longer in the military than any other president since the Civil War except Dwight Eisenhower. I was a submarine officer. I used the enormous and unmatched strength of America to promote peace for other people and preserve peace for ourselves.

“Now it seems as though it is an attractive thing in Washington to resort to war in the very early stage of resolving an altercation; a completely unnecessary war that President Bush decided to launch against the Iraqis is an example of that. And I think that a reaction against that warlike attitude on the part of America to the exclusion of almost all other nations in the world — and arousing fear in them — is going to be a driving issue.”

Warmth deficit

Democrat John Kerry “doesn’t warm anybody up,” and organized labor must help him create an emotional bond if fence-sitting union members are to vote for him in November, according to focus groups of undecided union voters.

But these union members find President Bush likable and strong, “with a nice family and good moral values,” said a memo of results prepared for the AFL-CIO and obtained by the Associated Press. The focus groups were conducted last month in St. Louis and Philadelphia by Lake Snell Perry & Associates, a Democratic firm.

The findings offer fresh evidence that Mr. Kerry’s reputation for aloofness is a hurdle the presumptive Democratic nominee must overcome — even among his party’s core constituencies, the AP reports. And despite the acidity labor leaders direct toward Mr. Bush and his policies, he still appeals to a segment of union members, namely the Reagan Democrats.

Republican beauty

The new Miss USA, crowned Monday night, says she will use her position to help explain America’s involvement in Iraq.

“What needed to be done had to be done,” Shandi Finnessey, who represented Missouri, told Reuters news agency at a party in Los Angeles after her crowning as Miss USA.

Miss Finnessey, a 25-year-old Republican, also said she is “totally single and looking.”