Columbia, South Carolina — For a man who had just grabbed the spotlight in a nationally televised presidential debate, Ron Paul seemed a little, well, defensive. A few minutes after the debate ended here at the University of South Carolina, Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, ventured into the Spin Room to talk to reporters, only to find that they wanted to know whether he really blamed the United States for the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“Who did that?” Paul snapped. “Who blamed America?”
“Well, your critics felt that you did.”
“No, I blamed bad policy over 50 years that leads to anti-Americanism,” Paul said. “That’s little bit different from saying ‘blame America.’ Don’t put those words in my mouth.”
“But the policies were bad American policies?”
“We’ve had an interventionist foreign policy for 50 years that has come back to haunt us,” Paul continued. “So that’s not ‘Blame America’ — that’s demagoguing, distorting issues…That’s deceitful to say those kinds of things.”
To many people, however, it did appear that Paul blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A few feet away from where Paul was meeting reporters, Washington lawyer Ted Olson, at the debate to support his friend Rudy Giuliani, was taken aback at what he heard from Paul. “I find it personally offensive and very disturbing,” said Olson, whose wife Barbara died on September 11, “that an American, especially an American member of Congress, can say those things about what happened to cause 9/11.”
It all started when Paul was asked how September 11 changed American foreign policy. “Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?” Paul answered. “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years…”
Questioner Wendell Goler, of Fox News, asked, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”
“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul said. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”
Enter Giuliani. “May I comment on that?” the mayor said, interrupting the orderly flow of things for the first time in the debate. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”
The audience loved it. As the applause built, Giuliani added, “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”
Paul didn’t back down, but by cutting in, Giuliani had scored some of the best, and perhaps easiest, points of the night. So much so that advisers from rival campaigns couldn’t quite hide their frustration that Giuliani had moved so quickly. “I don’t think it takes a lot of courage to use Ron Paul as a prop,” said Charlie Black, the longtime GOP strategist who is backing Sen. John McCain. “But he [Giuliani] got his 9/11 credential in there, so congratulations.”
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