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 Last Monday, Obama said he would hold such sessions with the leaders of Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea without preconditions, a notion Hillary Rodham Clinton rejected. She argued that she would not meet with leaders without knowing their intentions.
The feud between the two candidates escalated as they traded charges. Clinton called Obama "naive" while Obama referred to her as "Bush-Cheney lite."
"I don't want to get in the middle of that whole spat Hillary and Senator Obama had, but there's more than one way to practice diplomacy," Bill Clinton told a gathering of the Democratic Leadership Council.
He said all the major Democratic candidates had "a vigorous agreement on the big question, which is 'Should we have more diplomacy?' The answer is yes. Then you can parse their answers to the specific questions and decide who you think is right."
"I've heard no fewer than four candidates in the last month remind us that in the middle of the Cold War, in the darkest hours, we never stopped talking to the Soviets at some level. So nobody disputes that. And we're going to have to do that," he said.
Clinton addressed the centrist group that he chaired before his election in 1992. The major Democratic presidential candidates shunned the event this year.
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 The former president defended the DLC against those who question its relevance in today's political landscape.
"When people criticize the 1990s, they have to live in an evidence-free world," Clinton said, citing job creation and economic statistics from his two terms in office.
Clinton said he gets riled by the charge that the DLC cares more about the middle class than about poverty reduction, which he called the "the issue du jour." Clinton said the DLC's platform has always focused on lifting people out of poverty.
"The only way you can expand the middle class is to move people from poverty into it
-- unless you're trying to make rich people poorer," he said. "The last time I checked, the best anti-poverty program was a job."
Clinton only made fleeting references in his nearly hour-long speech to the current crop of Democrats vying for the presidential nomination.
"I really do like them all, though clearly I do have a favorite," he said.
[Associated Press;
by Erik Schelzig]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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