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With all of the Clarke discussion in the air, I'm just beginning to understand the rhetorical advantages of the line that "9/11 changed everything" (call me slow). This line focuses attention only on what the administration did following its 234th day in office -- quite a long time after the vaunted first 100 days that we're now hearing about from the campaign ads. This administration wants to be judged by what it did after 9/11/2001, but they also want to be able to blame Clinton for everything on the terrorism front that happened up to 9/11/2001. The administration even tried to start the clock again on the 100 days by beginning the count on September 11; see here.

The argument doesn't really work, however. The main difficulty is this: the Bush administration did not do anything significant on the terrorism front before September 2001, so the charges against Clinton are a boomerang. The first 100 days of the Bush presidency revealed its initial priorities: tax cuts, faith-based initiatives, an education bill, free trade zones, ditching Clinton environmental policies, and national missile defense. (Check out CNN here, and the NewsHour here.) The big foreign policy ideas of the 2000 campaign were establishing free trade zones, withdrawing from treaties, and developing national missile defense. If you don't believe me, go back and look at the platform, for example. Al Qaeda isn't even mentioned in the document.

BTW, that missle defense thing turned out to be really crucial in the war on terrorism, no? Seems about as important now as Traficant's hair.

Now the administration's reluctance on the 9/11 commission makes sense, I think, as do their covert attempts to bury the commission this spring (does anyone believe Hastert was acting solely on his own authority in initially refusing to extend the deadline for the report?). Perhaps they were afraid of what has happened this week, namely, that people would begin to apply to them the very same standards that the administration wants the public to use in judging a potential Democratic administration. Some Bush defenders want to spread the idea that "everyone got it wrong" before 9/11: "I don't blame the Clinton administration for 9/11, I don't blame the Bush administration for 9/11. I blame ourselves as a whole. We are all responsible." As a description of what might be in the head of this particular blog-poster, fair enough, but the overall message of the Bush / Cheney campaign is that it's all Clinton's fault. (For more links, go here.)

Ultimately, I don't believe that this particular issue -- what the administration did before 9/11 -- is all that critical, although as Scott McClellan might say, "it goes to credibility."

MORE: Here was part of the campaign plan: blame Clinton, then taint Kerry with the blame as well. That obviously becomes much harder if the administration can't blame Clinton without looking blameworthy itself, by the exact same criteria. The basic reason why I don't think that this issue is "critical" is that I think the main policy differences between Kerry and Bush are only partially implicated by these issues.