Russert's Gift to Bill Clinton: Brief Questions

NBC's Tim Russert has built a reputation for "Meet the Press" as the Sunday interview show to watch, due to a style that can be both aggressive and substantive. Russert guests are often pressed to respond to long text boxes of criticism or asked to defend their own controversial statements. When Russert goes soft, it's often obvious: the questions get short. In his Bill Clinton interview Sunday, instead of pressing the former president with 300-word questions, the entire list of questions was about 300 words long. One answer from Clinton was longer than the word count of all the Russert questions combined.

Here, in review, is the Russert list of questions to Clinton:

-- "The second year of the Clinton Global Initiative. What did you achieve this year?"

-- "Do people keep their commitments?"

-- "And you focus on poverty, religious and ethnic conflict, energy and climate change, and global public health."

-- "People make a commitment to invest in one of those programs...somewhere in the world?"

-- "Time is important, almost as important as money."

-- "Up 60 percent in one year."

-- "If it worked in Afghanistan, you could roll it out around other countries."

-- "As we sit here in September of 2006, what do you think is the biggest problem confronting our world? The biggest?"

-- "As you travel around the world, what do people say about the image of the United States?"

-- "What did you think when Colin Powell said, 'The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism'?"

-- "Would you outlaw waterboarding and sleep deprivation, loud music, all those kinds of tactics?"

-- "Two weeks ago, Vice President Cheney was on this program, and I said to him that we've spent $300 billion on Iraq. Now in hindsight, could that money, that $300 billion, been spent more effectively in other places?"

-- "You said the Iraq—Iraq was a mistake. Why?" (This had a text graphic: "It was a mistake." – Former President Bill Clinton, New Yorker, September 18.)

-- "You say, 'We may have to decide it's a lost cause.' How close are we to declaring it a lost cause?"

-- "After the 2002 midterm elections, you said that Democrats 'failed to offer a convincing case that they could manage national security during difficult times.' Do you think the Democrats have made the case in 2006?" (This is the toughest question of the interview. Clinton's answer was 494 words long.)

-- "You said that you weren't sure that if Hillary Clinton, Senator Clinton, ran for president, she'd win. I'm curious why you said that. And if she does run, are you, are your family ready for an intense, perhaps even negative campaign?"

-- "Would you be ready for an intense negative campaign again?"

And it ended: "Mr. President, we thank you, as always, for sharing your views."

Now compare that to Vice President Cheney two weeks ago. It's the proverbial night and day. Here's one 161-word question to Cheney, a definite hardball pitch:

"But the alternative view is that this has been a fundamental set of misjudgment, there were no weapons of mass destruction, there was no linkage of Iraq to September 11 and that there’s a, there’s a disconnect between rhetoric and reality. I want to go back to May 30, 2005, when you said to the American people and to the world, "I think the level of activity [in Iraq] that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Since that time, Mr. Vice President, look at this. Between the beginning of the war and May 30 when you made that statement, we had 1,656 deaths in Iraq. There are now a thousand more American servicemen. There are 7,500 more wounded and injured. There are 20,000 more dead Iraqis. Wasn’t it a flat-out mistake to say we were in the last throes of the insurgency?"

Russert was highly praised for the toughness of the Cheney interview. (Tom Brokaw, on Imus, was one big fan.) The question is not unfair, but it does strongly suggest that the Clinton interview went gooey, that Russert did little or no homework -- or perhaps that Tim Russert's longtime relationship with James Carville (including Carville having a business relationship with his college-aged son Luke) is affecting the strength of his work.

I've seen episodes of "My Little Pony" with more conflict than Russert's Clinton interview.