Heavy Hitters Debate at Forum

A crew for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was on hand last night at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum as an impressive roster of political pundits and former high-ranking government officials argued the merits of the United States’ policies at home and abroad.

The discussion, which focused on those policies with particular relevance to the presidential election this November, was divided into two panels of debaters: the first focused on American foreign affairs and the second on domestic policy.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was one of many prominent national figures who sat on the first panel, which began with the war in Iraq.

“The situation in Iraq is a mess,” Albright said. She called the conflict “a war of choice, not of necessity.”

When asked whether the war in Iraq could be considered a success, James Woolsey, who served as CIA director under President Bill Clinton, responded, “Not yet.” He maintained an optimistic tone, however, and emphasized the progress that coalition forces have made so far in Iraq.

The event, entitled “Election USA,” was sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the BBC.

Targeted chiefly to the BBC’s European audience, the event also addressed the United States’ reputation across the Atlantic Ocean.

“We cannot lead unless people follow,” former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke said. “We can’t [spread democracies] without allies.”

“From Roosevelt to Clinton,” Holbrooke added, “the rule was ‘multilateral if we can; unilateral if we must.’” The Bush Administration, he argued, has reversed that policy.

The second panel addressed the domestic policy issues at stake in the upcoming Presidential election. A video produced by the BBC preceding the discussion argued that the American electorate has drifted to the right since September 11th, focusing too much on national security and too little on issues like health care and the economy.

Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly, who elicited a din of boos and cheers from the audience before the taping commenced, attacked the BBC’s coverage of American politics. “There’s a linkage between terror and the economy,” O’Reilly said. “You guys spinning this thing like we’re a third-world country, that’s ridiculous.”

“Are you guys fair and balanced all the way?” he quipped.

“We never tell people to shut up,” moderator Stephen Sackur, the BBC’s Europe correspondent and a KSG graduate, responded.

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, called the BBC’s video “a caricature of America” that painted all Americans as either conservative or liberal, with no variation in between.

Much of the discussion centered on the present and future composition of the American electorate, an issue that fiercely divided the panelists.

“Most Americans are traditional people,” O’Reilly contended. “They’re not caught up in this conservative-liberal stuff...they look at the issue as whether it’s right or wrong.”

Universal Health Care and the No Child Left Behind Act also proved to be contentious issues. At the end of the discussion, the eight panelists offered more than a dozen potential responses when asked what the key issues in the November election will be.

“The foreign policy debate was a lot more fluid and insightful,” said attendee Shaan K. Hathirmani ’08, who added that he thought the domestic panel got too caught up in defining “liberal” and “conservative.”