Libyan strongperson Muammar Qaddafi calls President Clinton a “decent, peace-loving guy,” and says he’d like to meet him. That and $50,000 will get him a cup of White House coffee.
Trent Lott (R., Miss.) and other Senate Republicans have given President Clinton wide leeway in choosing his Cabinet, as is proper. But in the cases of the nominations of Alexis Herman for labor secretary and of Anthony Lake for director of central intelligence, consent should be withheld. Miss Herman, as head of the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, may have been involved in illegal campaign fund-raising; she is definitely, as revealed by Ira Stoll in the Forward, a quota-monger. Lake, as national security advisor, misled Congress (and the CIA) about Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia. His expressed doubts about Alger Hiss’s guilt do not increase his credibility as a spycatcher. Nor does his professed desire to make “environmental matters” a priority for the CIA. Lake is thoughtful, but he has always been a Sixties liberal, and his entire career shows him to be temperamentally unsuited to heading the CIA. As is sadly typical of Washington these days, his views don’t seem to be hurting him as much as his stock transactions. The odds are slightly in favor of both nominees’ being confirmed; Mr. Lake because Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and ex-DCI Robert Gates support him, Miss Herman because black women inspire fear and trembling among Beltway Republicans. Defeating them would remind the Clinton Administration that George Mitchell no longer runs the Senate. It might also encourage better appointments for future Supreme Court openings.
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