There is plenty on which to disagree with Sen. Edwards, but, if I were a Republican campaign strategist, I would steer clear of this Charlie Rose interview. Being critical of Sen. Edwards’s performance the day of the 9/11 attacks obviously invites comparison with everyone’s performance that day. Recall that on 9/11, President Bush’s team — unsure, as we all were that day, about the extent and nature of the threat, kept him away from Washington for hours. While we know in hindsight that the President provided inspiring leadership, there were many who cheap-shotted the immediate response that day. We also now know that protocols were not in place that day that would even tell our fighter pilots what they were permitted to do if they confronted hostile aircraft — which, of course, they never did because we were unable to get them scrambled quickly enough. I personally was in a room full of agents; several of us went about our business weeping — in part over the enormity of the horror (we had been very proud of convicting the terrorists who had previously tried to destroy the twin towers) and in part over the frustration that communications in New York were in such tatters that orders to take action could barely be transmitted, let alone followed. How do I think the President or General Myers or the FBI chief in New York (or, for what it’s worth, I) would have responded to Clancy’s rat-tat-tat “What are you gonna do now” questions in the heat of 9/11? I suspect it would not have been anyone’s finest hour.
It’s all well and good for Tom Clancy, fiction writer, to have badgered Edwards that day. Edwards, to his credit, responded by giving the Bush administration a much wider berth to settle on a sensible response than Clancy gave Edwards. If the point is that Edwards, like most of us, was not Rudy-heroic that day, that’s not much of a knock on Edwards.
In the aftermath of 9/11, as the President has had the conviction to prosecute the war, Sen. Edwards has flip-flopped on it while backing hair-brain schemes like an American MI-5 that would harm national security. That is to say, there is plenty of substance to argue about here. Let’s not stoop to such dross as whether he performed well on a talk show while the buildings were still burning.