March 18, 2004, 8:33 a.m.
Fisking Franken
Setting the record straight.

Spinsanity.com has just posted an exchange between me and Al Franken. I critique Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right; he critiques Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. This is my response to Franken's piece, which seems deceptively substantive at times, but in which Franken ultimately falls back on his usual mistakes, misunderstandings, selective quotations, and personal cheap shots. I'm going to roll through the Franken piece pretty thoroughly — skipping the plot summary, silly insults, and other fluff — so please excuse the length of this reply, but I want to set the record straight.

First, let me note that Franken remarks on "the irony" that my book makes a theme of Bill Clinton's denuded masculinity. I'm not sure what the irony is supposed to be, exactly, unless it is that Franken falsely suggests in his book that he had managed to frighten me out of writing on this theme by absurdly challenging me to a fistfight. Franken never even tries to show that I'm wrong about Clinton in particular, or about trends in our culture generally. At the end of his review, he says that serving in Vietnam is manly and being dishonest isn't. Okay — by that standard, Clinton, who dodged the draft and lied about it, is doubly unmanly.

Anyway, on to the other questions...

MY BROTHER
One of my problems with Franken's MO (and I write this over at Spinsanity) is how ad hominem it is. As if to prove my point, he opens his piece by slyly suggesting that the Robert to whom I dedicate my book — along with my parents — just might be my homosexual lover. I believe this is what liberals usually call "sexual McCarthyism." That Franken resorts to it shows how he can't help being gratuitously nasty. For those who care, Robert is my brother.

SCHIP
This gets pretty wonky, so brace yourself.

Franken says I make a "mistake" when I write of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (italics to highlight the point in contention), "The generous federal subsidy encouraged states to maximize their health benefits, essentially extending a federal entitlement to children living in families with incomes roughly 200 percent above the poverty line." But this is absolutely correct. It is Franken who is mistaken, and apparently doesn't have the slightest idea what he is writing about.

Such programs often apply to families with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line. It is a way to ensure that they reach the working poor. "200 percent of poverty" is, therefore, pretty standard public-policy argot, but Franken seems never to have heard of it, and insists that I'm wrong that SCHIP applies to families in that category. The error, however, is his: According to the American Medical Association, "SCHIP coverage is now available in 38 states and the District of Columbia for children up to age 19 whose family income is at or above 200 percent of the federal poverty level."

Franken also says the North Carolina SCHIP "was limited to children residing in families with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, not 200 percent above the poverty line."

If true, this would mean that the program applied only to the poorest of the poor, leaving out many people who are below the poverty line. This is silly and incorrect, which Franken would know if he had even run a Google search. Check out this site, among others, to see that North Carolina provides help to children in families earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty-level income figure.

Let this be a warning to other comedians: Don't try to do public policy.

On the issue of SCHIP and "crowding out," Franken disputes my contention that "many" families dropped private coverage to take government coverage instead. He cites a study of North Carolina's program by the Cedil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. Franken may well have stumbled upon this study by looking up a citation in my book for a study by the John Locke Foundation. The John Locke report mentions the Cedil G. Sheps study, but notes, "Unfortunately, the Sheps Center analysis is not a serious attempt to estimate crowd-out effects." Franken, of course, breezes right past this.

I'm not going settle here the broader argument about how extensive a problem "crowding out" is, since it's a murky and controversial phenomenon, but I was certainly on solid ground in writing in Legacy that crowding out was "muting" SCHIP's effectiveness, a deliberately mild word.

Here is a final Franken point on SCHIP: "Lowry goes onto say that 'coverage of children in low-income families was still lower in 1999 than it had been in 1995.' What Lowry fails to tell the reader is that money was first appropriated for SCHIP in 1998. In 1998 25.2 percent of low-income children were uninsured. In 2001 (the last year that data is available), 21.3 percent of low-income children were uninsured. The percentage of low-income children that were uninsured decreased each year the program was in effect during the Clinton years. So while it may be accurate to say that the coverage of children in low-income families was lower in 1999 than it had been in 1995, it is absolutely, and, probably, deliberately misleading."

Actually, it is Franken who misleads. He leaves out the sentence prior to the one he quotes from my book. Here is the context, in italics: "The program was basically defensive, intending to make up ground after Medicaid usage had declined with the passage of welfare reform. Coverage of children in low-income families was still lower in 1999 than it had been in 1995."

So I was making a point not about the effectiveness of SCHIP per se, but about its context. Clinton was still, relatively late in his presidency, trying to make up ground on health care. Lest you think this is only a point a Clinton-basher would make, respected (and by no means conservative) former Congressional Budget Office head Robert Reischauer has made the same point. The book American Economic Policy in the 1990s, considered the holy grail of Clinton domestic policy by former Clinton advisers, reports his comments during a panel on this issue thusly:

Robert Reischauer responded to [the] claim that SCHIP is a major Clinton administration success by pointing out [that] the program's main goal is to counter the negative and unanticipated effect of welfare reform in pushing people out of Medicaid into uninsurance. A policy that partially repairs the collateral damage done by another administration policy, he suggested, is not the same as a success that improves the situation relative to a pre-administration benchmark. The reason uninsurance rates increased since the middle of the decade is that Medicaid enrollment fell rapidly, and SCHIP represents an attempt to counter that trend.

Thanks for slogging through this rather dull public policy: As your reward, you now know that Franken's SCHIP points are totally without merit.

TEST SCORES
Franken takes issue with my statement that in the 1990s the national test-score picture "was basically flat," citing improved performance for fourth graders between 1990 and 2000. You can play all sorts of games with test scores, which are a very complicated business, and Franken is obviously being selective by focusing on the gains of fourth graders.

Check out this 1999 report (the most recent I could find) on long-term trends by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Let's compare 1992, the year before Clinton took office, to 1999. It reports that reading scores on its test for 17-year-olds went from 290 in 1992 to 288 in 1999; for 13-year-olds, it went from 260 to 259; for 9-year-olds, it went from 211 to 212. On math, the picture was a little bit better: 17-year-olds went from 307 in 1992 to 308 in 1999; 13-year-olds went from 273 to 276; 9-year-olds went from 230 to 232. On science, 17-year-olds went from 294 to 295; 13-year-olds went from 258 to 256; 9-year-olds went from 231 to 229. In other words, the picture looks basically flat.

As for SAT scores, between 1993 and 2000, verbal scores increased slightly (up three points), while math scores increased more (up nine points). But those who looked more closely were skeptical of great strides being made in math skills in the U.S. Here is Brookings Institution analyst Tom Loveless: "Students lost ground in most computation skills during the 1990s." He continues, addressing the matter of Franken's prized fourth graders,

Take a closer look at the scores for nine-year-olds. These skills comprise the basic arithmetic that all fourth graders are expected to master — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers. All four areas reversed direction in the 1990s, turning solid gains that were made in the 1980s into losses. Not only that, but the declines came from levels that weren't very high at the beginning of the 1990s — certainly not at a level that is acceptable for such fundamental material.

Check out this Brookings discussion if you want to punish yourself and see just how complicated parsing test scores is. How optimistic or pessimistic you want to be depends on which expert you believe. I tend to trust the highly respected Checker Finn, who says of a big Brookings study on test scores in the 1990s (italics added): "What we learn is slightly encouraging, but hardly cause for breaking out the champagne. The gains in reading, as Tom [Loveless] showed, are tiny. Those in math are somewhat larger, but most of them fade away by 12th grade. And they're pretty flat in the 1990s, particularly if you look at the trend data, the 30-year trend data."

By the way, blacks lost ground academically to whites all during the 1990s. According to Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, in their recent book No Excuses, "The gap in academic achievement that we see today is actually worse than it was fifteen years ago. In the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, it was closing, but around 1988 it began to widen, with no turnaround in sight."

I don't want to argue that Clinton was an awful education president. As I write in my book, he more or less continued the Bush I policy, which didn't produce fantastic results under the stewardship of either president.

VIRGINIA KELLEY
Franken complains that my citations "disappear at curious times." He notes, for instance, that there is no citation for my statement, "There is doubt whether [William Blythe] was actually Clinton's father." It is true that I didn't put an endnote on every sentence in my book, especially when the next citation would direct the curious reader to a source for the information. Franken, if he had looked up the notes on that page, would have been directed to a section in Gail Sheehy's book Hillary's Choice (p. 94) that observes, "Clinton biographer David Maraniss began to question Bill Clinton's paternity in his 1995 book, First in His Class."

Franken also complains that there is no citation for my statement that "promiscuity and sexual intrigue . . . surrounded Virginia." If Franken doubts this, he obviously knows nothing about her. Her first husband, William Blythe, was a bigamist (Marinass, pp. 25-28). Her second, Roger Clinton, was a philanderer (Marinass, p. 31), and she would flirt with other men explicitly to drive him crazy (Sheehy, p. 98). She married five times (Sheehy, p. 92).

FIREFIGHTERS
Franken complains that I try to make "some odd point about manliness" by noting that all the firefighters who died on 9/11 were men. The point I was making was fairly obvious — that New York City firefighters were roughly 99 percent male in 2001 because of the extraordinary physical rigors of the job. That women are otherwise perfectly capable of heroic self-sacrifice — Franken reminds us of the two female EMTs and one female cop who died on September 11 — seems to me to go without saying.

THE ECONOMY
Franken says that I give Clinton credit for "nothing" on the economy. Actually, I credit him with abandoning his more wild-eyed spending plans from the 1992 campaign, with pushing free-trade agreements, with staying out of Alan Greenspan's way, with cutting taxes on the rich in 1997, with signing various deregulatory measures, and with adopting a hands-off policy toward high-tech. That's quite a lot. But since this admirable part of Clinton's record doesn't involve raising taxes, Franken and other liberals want to ignore it. I am more willing to give Clinton credit for these policies than are his tendentious liberal defenders.

What they like to talk about is the 1993 economic plan, and Franken disputes my case that that plan didn't significantly "grow" the economy or reduce the deficit. He first tries to paint the economy as having been in great distress in 1992, despite the fact that, as I note in Legacy, the recession had officially ended in March 1991 and annual economic growth in 1992 was roughly 3 percent. He tries a few different tacks:

Franken cites high unemployment numbers in 1992, but everyone else knows employment is a lagging indicator. And by Franken's own reckoning, the unemployment rate had dropped half a point before Clinton even took office.

He notes that GDP growth in the first quarter of 1993 was weak. But in the fourth quarter of 1992 it was quite strong. According to the Associated Press (January 28, 1994), growth in the fourth quarter of 1992 was 5.7 percent. What may have been happening is that both the poor performance in the first quarter of 1993 and the strong performance in the fourth quarter of 1992 were exaggerated because people were shifting income into 1992 in anticipation of the Clinton tax increases.

He says that economic forecasts for 1993 worsened throughout 1992, but began to turn around in December. Franken doesn't seem to realize that this reinforces my point — that things were looking up long before any Clinton economic policies were passed, let alone took effect.

He mentions that the deficit hit $290 billion in 1992, and it was projected to go higher. But the projections — as they often are — were proven false when economic conditions began to improve, as they did before any Clinton policies took effect. From fiscal year 1992 to fiscal year 1993, the deficit had already declined $40 billion, before the Clinton plan did anything (it was passed at the end of fiscal year 1993).Franken then goes on to quote three commentators saying the state of the economy was bad in 1992. Well, you can quote any three commentators saying anything. Alan Reynolds, for instance, was saying the opposite in an October 21, 1992, piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, "The Worst Lying About the Economy in the Past 50 Years." Reynolds wrote,

In the first debate, Mr. Clinton said we are suffering "the first decline in industrial production, ever." What? The country has never before had a recession? . . . Industrial production has risen by 2.1 percent since May 1991, and manufacturing alone (excluding mining and utilities) by 2.8 percent. Meanwhile, industrial production over the past year has fallen by 2.5 percent in Germany and by 7.6 percent in Japan. Over the past year, the U.S. economy has grown faster than the economies of Japan, Germany, Canada, or Britain (the first two of those last four, presumably, being Mr. Clinton's models).

And check out this New York Times piece from November 30, 1992, by Sylvia Nasar, titled "Signals of the Clinton Recovery: Rebound Is Seen, but a Slow One": "A number of business executives say the Clinton expansion may have arrived even before the President-elect moves into the White House."
The fact is that economic growth in 1992 was 3.3 percent, higher than in both 1993 and 1995, which saw 2.7 and 2.5-percent expansions, respectively.

Franken can't paint 1992 as a cesspit of economic despair without doing the same for 1995, by which time the Clinton plan was supposed to be well on its way to changing the American economy forever.

The 1993 plan. As for the 1993 plan itself, Franken quotes Alan Greenspan and Business Week praising it. This is simply arguing from authority — I can quote plenty of people saying the plan doesn't deserve such praise. Greenspan is obviously a heavy hitter, but he isn't infallible, and since he had such a big role in crafting a 1993 plan, I would tend to discount his views on it somewhat. In fact, Greenspan has seemed to flip his position. Now he is saying that deficit reduction isn't as important as maintaining low taxes.

The question here isn't who can best cherry-pick quotes from Nexis, it is whether the plan lowered interest rates and therefore stoked economic growth, as its defenders say. As I write in Legacy, interest rates went up fairly shortly after the plan's passage. This leaves defenders of the plan in the position of arguing that interest rates dropped in anticipation of the plan's passage. Franken invokes the "rational expectations" revolution of the 1970s to suggest the plan very well could have had this effect. Yes, it could have, if there is a firm relationship between federal budget deficits and interest rates.

But there isn't. (Check out this Alan Reynolds piece on the non-relationship and this one.) Franken doesn't even bother to try to show that there is such a relationship. And he doesn't deal with the fact that interest rates had been declining well before Clinton took office. As I write in my book, "The general trend in long-term interest rates had been downward for about a decade, and had been dropping relatively steadily since March 1992. Had the market been anticipating Clinton's 1993 plan since then?" Franken has no answer.

Even if there were a close relationship between the budget deficit and interest rates, the market would have to have been sure of the passage of the Clinton plan to react so strongly in anticipation (the plan barely passed the House). Even after the plan passed, the projections still were for annual deficits of $200 billion a year over the long term — another important point Franken passes over. And after Republicans took Congress in 1994, Clinton maintained it was unrealistic to try to balance the budget, until he was forced by the GOP to become in favor of eliminating the deficit. By Franken's logic — deficit reduction causes economic growth — Republicans should get a big part of the credit for the growth in the 1990s.

Reagan. Franken says I credit Reagan for the 1990s boom, but that "[t]here's no real argument to support this — just the bald statement." But he cuts out all of my argument in his piece with ellipses! Here are the passages he assiduously avoids quoting and that set out how Reagan killed inflation — enduring a tough recession as a result — and created a low-tax economy (the parts Franken does quote are in bold italics, just to give you an idea of his dishonest selectivity):

So, why did the economy grow so vigorously in the 1990s? The American economy had been shifted into a fundamentally different gear by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. He drove a stake through the "stagflationary" economics — high unemployment and high inflation — of the 1970s. He cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent in 1981 and then from 50 percent to 28 percent in 1986. Keynesians maintained that if you cut taxes, inflation would rise. Reagan economists saw the cuts as counter-inflationary. With more after-tax rewards, the workforce would be more productive, thus more goods would absorb more money. The tax changes were coupled with a strong dollar, and inflation plummeted from roughly 15 percent in 1980 to roughly 4 percent in 1983. As inflation declined, long-term interest rates dropped, easing borrowing. The economy and corporate profits grew, while the stock market exploded. The seemingly perpetual economic doldrums of the 1970s had been replaced by economic renewal.As Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert Bartley notes in his classic defense of the 1980s, The Seven Fat Years, from 1982 to 1990, the economy grew by a third, and created 18.4 million jobs. Despite the budget deficit, gross private investment increased 32 percent. And amid howls about the de-industrialization of America, manufacturing production grew 48 percent. Interest-rate increases by the Fed, a mild oil shock with the price increases of the first Gulf War, and a credit crunch associated with the savings and loan mess contributed to a slowdown beginning in the middle of 1990. Clinton jumped on the recession as the long over-due bill for the 1980s. But the slowdown was only a blip, before the economy produced another decade of growth. In a straight-on decade-to-decade comparison, the 1980s and 1990s look very similar. Average economic growth in the 1980s was 3.02 percent. Average economic growth in the 1990s was 3.03 percent. The average stock market return in the 1980s was 18.58 percent. The average stock market return in the 1990s was 18.83 percent. Upon taking office, Clinton was well positioned to take advantage of the 1980s, Part II.Corporate America had slimmed down and toughened up through the restructuring of the 1980s and the downsizing of the early 1990s....

More argument continues from there.

Franken notes that I say that the 1980s and 1990s looked very similar, then — in a "gotcha!" tone — recounts some of the differences, in terms of wages and reductions in poverty. But I say that the similarities in GDP growth and stock-market returns for the two decades are part of an "obviously ... broad-brush comparison." A fair reader of my book would never conclude that I try to downplay the economic and social wonders of the 1990s; I just dispute the argument that they were all Clinton's doing.

For instance, Franken trumpets the reductions in poverty in the 1990s, but those great figures and more are all duly reported in my welfare-reform chapter. He makes it seem as if I ignore them. I don't, and I spend most of the chapter explaining how GOP-supported welfare reform helped make these numbers possible.

He claims that I "wrongly" say that both the 1980s and 1990s — to use the liberals' term of abuse — "left the poor behind." But the income disparity between rich and poor continued to grow throughout much of the 1990s. I quote Robert Reich as saying, "Most of the gains from the 1990s boom went to the people [at] the top. The rich have gotten substantially richer." As the New York Times reported on May 31, 2001, "An analysis of the budget office study released today by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, reached a similar conclusion. The group said that 'income gaps between rich and poor and between the rich and middle class widened in the 1980s and 1990s alike and reached their widest point on record in 1997.'"

Mexican bailout. Franken says I "blithely" dismiss the Clinton administration's Mexican bailout. Well, not quite. I note that the bailout "may have seemed necessary," and write that "[i]t is difficult . . . for any administration to resist the temptation to 'do something' about a significant economy in trouble." But I argue that the financial "contagion" the administration tried to contain with this and other bailouts "was just another word for a sensible financial retreat from parts of the world where market reforms and new investment opportunities were significantly oversold in the hype over globalization." Franken doesn't rebut this point. Clinton did, as Franken says, defy the polls to go ahead with the Mexican bailout, but this is an issue where elite opinion-makers were fairly united. Even Newt Gingrich supported Clinton on the bailout.

TERROR
The CIA briefing. I write of Clinton that "his schedule was so chaotic he couldn't receive a regular morning CIA briefing." Franken criticizes me for using a citation that only talks about Clinton's briefings while he was a candidate and president-elect. Okay, but what I wrote was still correct, which Franken apparently doesn't realize. Consider this:

The Washington PostFebruary 19, 2001CIA Blocks History's Access to Briefings; State Dept. Chroniclers SeekBy Vernon Loeb . . . . After President Clinton declined to receive the daily briefing early in his first term, special efforts were made to spice up the PDB with clandestine reporting, intercepts and spy satellite imagery unique to the intelligence community.

Or this:

CNN: "Bush prefers CIA intelligence briefings face to face; Clinton liked written summaries"From David Ensor January 18, 2001

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Even before Vice President Gore congratulated George W. Bush on his victory in the election, a long tradition quietly resumed: the Central Intelligence Agency started briefing Bush, every day, face to face.
Everywhere Bush has gone since then, from Austin, Texas, to Florida for a fishing vacation, a CIA briefer has been there to meet with him each morning, officials said. That was the way his father, former President George Bush, preferred it too. But for eight years, President Clinton only wanted the "PDB" — the CIA daily briefing — in writing, leaving it to his national security advisor to talk directly with CIA analysts each day.

The Clinton "war plan." Franken is outraged that I cite a Time magazine cover story for the proposition that an anti-al Qaeda "military plan was wending its way to President Bush even before the [Sept. 11] attacks." He is dismayed that I don't mention that the Time story reported that Clinton officials handed a war plan over to Bush during the transition. I didn't include this information because I had good reason to think that it was false. Bush NSC officials have denied there was any Clinton plan; former Clinton NSC officials have denied it too. One of them told National Review's Byron York for a September 2, 2002, story, "There were certainly ongoing efforts throughout the eight years of the Clinton administration to fight terrorism. It was certainly not a formal war plan. We wouldn't have characterized it as a formal war plan." And Sandy Berger himself has shot down the Time magazine story in congressional testimony.

NR and Clinton. Franken quotes various NR pieces on terrorism prior to 9/11 in the course of defending Clinton's record on terror. Several of these pieces date from before my editorship. I took over the magazine in January 1998, which I told Franken and his researcher, but they still get it wrong. The December 1997 piece by Gene Methvin was wrong and much too generous toward Clinton. The 1996/1997 John Dizard pieces — bylined columns that didn't represent magazine policy — seem indefensible to me. Dizard moved his column elsewhere around the time I became editor.

As for NR's editorial statements, Franken leaves out our post-1998 embassy-bombings editorial, perhaps because it clearly expresses contempt for Clinton's reluctance to use force against our enemies. We defended Clinton against his Republican wag-the-dog critics at the time, but in this way (emphasis added): "Congressional leaders were therefore right to support President Clinton's action. The last thing Republicans should do is add to the inhibitions and hesitations of an administration congenitally averse to the forthright use of American military power." The editorial went on: "Launching 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the training camp in Afghanistan and the chemical-weapons plant in Sudan was, by Clinton standards, a strong performance."

While we hadn't yet drawn up the invasion plans for Afghanistan, you can see where we wanted things to go: "While he is a freelancer, bin Laden is dependent on the support of renegade governments, such as Afghanistan's and Sudan's, against which we have leverage. We can target his physical assets by military or covert means and his financial assets through other controls (as Mr. Clinton has also done)."

As it turned out, the administration exercised almost no leverage over Afghanistan; it didn't even name it a terrorist state. It didn't undertake military strikes against any aspect of bin Laden's network ever again. And the targeting of bin Laden's financial assets was minimal — we gave Clinton too much credit on this score.

Indeed, in retrospect, our editorial was too generous. The "chemical-weapons plant in Sudan" probably wasn't a chemical-weapons plant. The Clinton administration just wanted to hit two targets in a tit-for-tat retaliation for bin Laden's bombing of two embassies. So the site in the Sudan was hastily chosen for symbolic reasons; it was the administration's substitute for a sustained campaign of the sort NR advocated. "They reached down to any target they could get," former General Wayne Downing, who commanded U.S. Special Forces from 1993 to 1996, told me.

Franken then criticizes NR for writing this about the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole: "The Cole may not be the equivalent of Desert One, a debacle that symbolizes a perilous decline of American power. But the backdrop to the attack is troubling nonetheless. Such a sophisticated terrorist operation typically depends on well-developed networks for support, and that no word had trickled out to U.S. intelligence is another sign of declining American prestige in the region. The Gulf War coalition against Iraq has almost entirely collapsed, and America's credibility has been frayed by its periodic and ineffectual cruise-missile attacks against Saddam. To restore America's reputation in the Gulf, the next president will have to adopt a tougher strategy toward the Iraqi regime. But it would be a good first step to hunt down the perpetrators of this crime, and send them swiftly to oblivion."

Franken paraphrases "send them swiftly to oblivion" as "Catch the perpetrators." They are not the same thing. No effort was made to send those responsible to "oblivion," because, as some former Clinton officials involved now say, there wasn't enough evidence that al Qaeda was responsible. This is dishonest excuse-making. "I don't think there was much question to most people who looked at the Cole that this was al Qaeda," a former Clinton defense official told me. "I was comfortable that it was al Qaeda. There was no doubt about it: The level of expertise — everything — pointed to al Qaeda. It may have been a case of people looking for a higher standard of proof. Maybe that's the weasel way out — if it's just too difficult."

In Legacy, I write that the political culture as a whole didn't take terrorism seriously enough in the 1990s (see p. 24) — and NR surely could have written more and featured what it did write more prominently. But, more importantly, this is an area in which the country could have used some presidential leadership, and didn't get it. The Clinton White House knew more about the threat from al Qaeda than most anyone else in the country. This is one of the premises of former Clinton NSC staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's book, The Age of Sacred Terror, which is supposed to be a defense of Clinton policy but often reads like a condemnation. Over and over, they write that the Clinton administration knew about the threat. They just couldn't manage to do anything serious about it.

"We urgently understood the U. B. L. threat," a former Clinton official told me, confirming the Benjamin and Simon account. "There have been former Clinton people on background, saying 'Jeez, we didn't know the threat was that bad.' And my answer is, 'Bull — — , we didn't.' The people who were involved in that knew that this was a really big deal. Should we have taken more chances? That's a legitimate question. But it's not legitimate for anyone who worked in the Clinton administration and tackled some of these issues to pass this off and say, 'We didn't know it was that bad.' We did."

If Clinton had decided to fight terrorism in a sustained way, NR — as these statements suggest — would have cheered him on. But he didn't. He spent more money and foiled some plots, things I give him credit for. But he was unwilling to see the terror attacks of the 1990s as a war, concentrating instead on the law-enforcement approach of arresting people after the fact. Franken duly champions these arrests as great Clinton victories, but as long as we allowed bin Laden to have a sanctuary in Afghanistan, he was always on the offensive. Clinton, as the Washington Post has reported, wasn't even willing to give the CIA clear instructions to kill bin Laden.

Benjamin and Simon. Franken writes that I often cite Benjamin and Simon. I do, not only because they're smart, but because they are telling essentially Sandy Berger's version of events, which means that they are a source that can't be denounced as "Clinton-hating." (For this reason, I rely heavily on books and statements by former Clinton officials throughout Legacy.) But this doesn't oblige me to believe things they write when it is contradicted by other evidence. For instance, I don't accept their version of the Cole bombing. They say there was no immediate hard evidence of an al Qaeda link, but many other credible sources say that there was.

Franken is outraged that I don't accept Benjamin and Simon's version of a Clinton meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah about the Khobar Towers investigation. Instead, I rely on a New Yorker article that was very well-sourced with Saudi and FBI officials and reports that Clinton played softball with the Saudis at that meeting. This accords with what FBI officials I interviewed said about the administration's general handling of the Saudis in that case. I include in the endnotes that Berger disputed the notion that Clinton didn't push the Saudis in that meeting, and I report that the White House thought FBI Director Louis Freeh was out of line during the case. So I let readers know how I come down, while acknowledging the dispute over the facts.

CLINTON'S POST-PRESIDENCY
Franken says my paraphrase of Clinton saying he needed to rake in cash after leaving office is a "non-existent statement," suggesting it must be based on a complete fabrication. When Franken asked me for verification, I told him I didn't want to dig through my research material and I suggested (if memory serves) that he could do a Nexis search. If he had done one, he would have come up with this Clinton statement from a Larry King interview in February 2003: "I never cared about money, but I needed it. I had big legal bills to pay." He also would have found this Clinton statement in an Atlantic Monthly from March 2003: "After I get my legal bills paid and my houses paid, and all that kind of stuff, I'd like to get where I can just spend 100 percent of my time on public service. That's my objective, and I hope by the time I'm 60 I'll be able to do that."

Now, I say in Legacy that Clinton has "mostly" devoted himself to making money and partying. Franken suggests that this is wrong because Clinton's AIDS foundation has done good work. But how much time has Clinton himself spent on it and other philanthropy? Most of his time? That seems doubtful. And Franken doesn't say. Read the stories about Clinton's post-presidency and you get the clear impression that he has made tons of money, defended his legacy (in his speeches and his forthcoming book), and enjoyed himself — all activities I mention in my book — with charitable and AIDS work thrown in. I certainly hope Clinton eventually finds the time to devote himself more fully to good works, once he has paid his legal bills and finished his sure-to-be absurdly self-justifying memoir.

So, that's it? Franken could find policy disagreements and things to quibble with, but not one lie properly defined. This is very surprising, since, as a conservative who edits a conservative magazine and wrote a conservative book, I should easily qualify as one of Franken's lying liars. Unless, of course, the thesis of his book is ridiculously overdrawn.