Columnist William Safire says if Hillary Rodham Clinton is called before congressional committees, a "Marcia Clark type" should be hired to question her.
Safire, in Wednesday's New York Times, responds to President Clinton's threat, through a spokesman, to punch the pundit's nose for calling the first lady "a congenital liar."In his column, Safire writes that everyone he knows has been calling to get ringside tickets to the fight. "Sorry, guys," he says, "direct your requests to the promoter, White House press secretary Mike McCurry."
It was McCurry who said Clinton would have liked to deliver "a more forceful response to the bridge of Mr. Safire's nose" in response to Safire's Monday column about the first lady.
"That rescued from obscurity an essay that had disappeared into the Blizzard of '96," Safire says. "Hardly anybody in Washington received that issue of the paper."
He also says it would have been sexist to give Hillary Clinton "a free pass" over her role in the White-water affair and the firings at the White House travel office.
Safire asks: "What should the committees do when she requests the Joan of Arc role before their inquisition? Answer: Avoid the sexist trap. Hire a Marcia Clark type and assign her to penetrate Mrs. Clinton's lawyerly obfuscations, to go after the originals of potentially fraudulent billing or expense records, to compare her public statements with contemporaneous notes, and to contrast her sworn statements with conflicting testimony."
The columnist says that in defending his wife, Clinton was associating himself with "scrappy Harry Truman, who once told a critic, `you'll need a new nose.' "
"On a personal note, I realize the Clintons have given me a valuable gift of historic notoriety, and I am grateful; it's like an uncriticizable bribe," Safire writes.
"So the Presidential Punch-a-thon is permanently postponed. I would, however, be amenable to snowballs at 40 paces."