If Hillary had shown up at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally, the Iranian threat would have been a sideshow.
By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLLandrew silow-carroll 88(photo credit: )
Sometime in the past century I was an intern at the Jewish Community Relations Council in Philadelphia, where my big claim to fame was helping stage an Israel Independence Day celebration.
It was a hugely educational experience. I learned to staff committees, negotiate with municipal officials and placate angry vendors.
I also learned that I needed to become a journalist, so that never again would I have to staff committees, negotiate with municipal officials and placate angry vendors.
I also learned Rule One of community relations work: Keep it nonpartisan. If a Democratic mayor is going to be there, invite the highest-ranking Republican. If there is an election going on, make sure all the campaigns are sent an invitation - or none at all.
Whichever side you choose to blame in the fiasco surrounding this week's anti-Iran rally in New York, someone forgot Rule One.
With Iran's hateful president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his way to yet another back rub at the UN General Assembly, a coalition of Jewish groups, led by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, announced plans for a major rally. The message was clear and profound: Iran must be stopped before it makes good on its threats to develop a nuclear weapon and the ability to target Israel and the West, blackmail its neighbors and destabilize the Mideast even further.
Early in the planning process, organizers invited Sen. Hillary Clinton to speak, and the New York Democrat agreed. Weeks later, one of the organizers invited the McCain camp to send a representative, and announced that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would do the honors. In an act that launched a thousand op-eds, Clinton dropped out, saying Palin's appearance would "politicize" the nonpartisan event.
AT THIS point, according to reporters I've learned to trust on these topics (including the JTA), two of the co-sponsors of the rally, the JCRC of New York and New York's UJA Federation, demanded that the Conference of Presidents rescind the invitation to Palin, or at least extend a similar offer to the Obama camp. In the end, the organizers decided to keep politicians off the podium altogether.
(Here's what did not happen, according to reliable reports: Obama's folks did not demand that Hillary withdraw.)
Let's be fair to Clinton's critics for a moment and acknowledge that she had options besides canceling. She could, for instance, have just sucked it up and given her speech, making sure she and Palin were separated by a respectable amount of time or space. Or she could have waited to see if the Obama folks would send Joe Biden, or even Obama himself.
That's all well and good, but she was right in her diagnosis. First, a sitting senator from New York, regardless of her support for her party's presidential candidate, doesn't "balance" a member of a party's presidential ticket. She just doesn't.
Second, Palin's appearance would have turned a nonpartisan rally into a campaign event. Worse, with Clinton on the podium, it would have become a bit of political street theater that would have distracted from, and probably obliterated, the intended message of the rally. The threat Iran poses to Israel would have been a sideshow to the main event: The Scrappin' Alaskan vs. the Clintonator.
Some have argued that the rally would have benefited from this kind of publicity, although I can't see how. The rally's message was that a nuclear Iran is not a Democratic or Republican issue, but a global one. Were Palin and Biden both to have given speeches, the pundits would have spent the next news cycle comparing and contrasting their approaches to Teheran. (Indeed, a close reading of Palin's undelivered speech, reprinted in the New York Sun, contains a few none-too-subtle reminders about how McCain's Iran policy differs from Obama's.) That's great for a debate, but not for a nonpartisan rally.
And were Palin to have spoken in the absence of a Democrat, the news focus would have been on her "performance." How did she do? Did she burnish her foreign policy credentials? Was she popular with the largely Jewish crowd?
AMONG THE biggest critics of the organizers' decision to drop Palin are those who most often decry the bias and triviality of the "mainstream media." Why would they think the "MSM" would have risen to the occasion in this instance and kept the focus on Ahmadinejad?
So sure, Clinton had options, but the organizers had better options.
Joseph Lieberman, Rudolph Giuliani or Eric Cantor would each have been a better choice to "balance" Clinton. Or they could have taken their cues from whoever organized the op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week by a truly nonpartisan quartet: Richard Holbrooke, James Woolsey, Dennis Ross and Mark Wallace.
Seeking "effective US policies in coordination with our allies" to confront a "deadly and irresponsible world actor," these veterans of Republican and Democratic administrations offered a powerful reminder of Rule One: "We may have different political allegiances and worldviews, yet we share a common concern - Iran's drive to be a nuclear state."
End of story.
The writer is editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News.
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