The era of congressional junkets to tropical paradises is largely over, but nothere's a new criticism: Congressmen don't travel abroad enough.
In a 1997 interview, Hillary Clinton bemoaned that "a very large proportion ofCongress as constituted after the 1994 election" -- i.e., a Congress full of Republican rubes -- had never held a passport. More recently, she declared that this "very large proportion" was 30 percent.
In a February speech in Miami, Clinton chum Mickey Kantor (see above, "Lie with the Lions") ratcheted up the shocking figure to 40 percent. Then on April 4, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times chimed in: "At a time when most members of Congress don't even hold passports, when many senators really did learn their foreign affairs at the International House of Pancakes, and when the Republican Party has no foreign-policy vision or leadership whatsoever, there is a foreign- policy vacuum in America."
Says who? Former Clinton aide David Gergen credits the statistic to the non-profit National Security Caucus Foundation. The NSCF, however, claims it heard the number from an "undisclosed source" at the State Department. The truth of the matter, according to the State Department's Consular Affairs department, is that 75 percent of congressmen hold either official or diplomatic passports. Many of the rest hold tourist passports.
Leave aside whether a history of tourism is the best qualification for judging America's national interest; after all, until the president let her tag along on state visits, our very own first lady could have been said to be something of an untraveled yokel herself. The source of the no-passports urban myth is less likely to be found in State Department files than in the self-regard of this newly minted world traveler.