Leaders Learn About ‘Clinton Time’
The NATO summit turned out to be a waiting game not only for nations that saw their bids to join the alliance put on hold but for the leaders themselves.
President Clinton was late so often his fellow leaders began joking about it.
He kept King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia waiting in a palace throne room to receive him for a dinner for the heads of state. Twenty-five minutes after Clinton’s scheduled arrival, the couple gave up and left the room.
Ten minutes later Clinton showed up.
The president’s habitual tardiness is known as “Clinton time.” He once kept the king and queen of Jordan waiting for 20 minutes on the tarmac as he ate dinner aboard Air Force One.
On Wednesday, Clinton delayed a summit session for half an hour as his colleagues waited for him.
The leaders played a joke on the waiting photographers, pretending to leave the hall. Clinton arrived minutes later.
Backbiting
In remarks meant for another leader’s ears only, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien criticized U.S. politics as a back-scratching system where lawmakers “sell their votes.”
Chretien made the comments to a laughing Jean-Luc Dehaene, Belgium’s prime minister, in front of a microphone that happened to be recording.
They talked while biding time on a dais with other NATO leaders during one of those waits for Clinton.
Chretien said that while leaders in parliamentary systems like his can exert their will, Clinton has to swap favors and hand out parochial goodies to members of Congress to obtain their support.
“In your country and my country all the politicians would be in prison” if they did that, he told Dehaene in comments recorded by the host broadcaster, a Spanish TV network, and translated from French by The Canadian Press.
“Because they sell their votes. They sell their votes.
“You want me to vote on NATO? Then you have to vote to build me a bridge in my constituency. That’s what’s unbelievable.”
Some leaders were frustrated at U.S. insistence on limiting a round of NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
“It’s all done for short-term political reasons to win elections,” Chretien said.
Dehaene suggested large Czech, Polish and Hungarian communities in the United States played a role and said he told the Romanians they should send more immigrants to America if they want to join NATO.