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Eight Questions Reporters Should Ask Clinton

And not a single one about race!
January 21, 2008

The following is the fourth post in my Questions Reporters Should Ask series. My goal for the series is to highlight questions that, to my mind and to the best of my research, the press has not asked (or at least not asked often or insistently enough) of, in this case, the Democratic candidate Senator Hillary Clinton. I’ll be posing questions for other candidates going forward. Next up: John McCain.

Questions for Hillary Clinton

1. Richard Holbrooke, one of your chief foreign policy supporters, wrote in 2005 that the “Global War on Terror” “is not an accurate description of America’s enemy or of what we are engaged in.” But you use the term “war on terror.” Why?

2. Do you propose to preserve American bases in Iraq?

3. Are you prepared to renounce the Bush Doctrine, which permits preventive war? If the answer is “yes,” how do you square that with your vote to brand Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organization,” and your refusal to take military action against Iran “off the table”?

4. In 1999, your husband withdrew the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty from Senate consideration in the belief that the Senate would not vote to ratify it by the necessary two-thirds vote. Do you anticipate being able to work with the Senate to pass such a treaty, or indeed any arms control treaty? How would you persuade dissenters?

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5. Which of the Bush administration’s privacy-invading and government secrecy measures do you reject?

6. To what extent should the money saved by phasing out American combat operations in Iraq be used to reduce the deficit, and to what extent should it be used for creating jobs, environmentally sensible investments, and social programs?

7. One of your chief economic advisers, Gene Sperling, has written that “there are goals—banning child labor in our factories; preventing racial, religious, and gender discrimination in the workforce—that require direct intervention in the market regardless of their efficiency or economic impact.” Is government support for the organizing of unions among the “direct interventions” you favor?

8. Do you believe that the protection of drug company patents is a responsibility of the federal government?

Research assistance by Michael Meyer

Todd Gitlin , who chairs the interdisciplinary Ph.D program in Communication based at the Columbia Journalism School, is the author of 17 books, of which the next is a novel, The Opposition.