Schiff: I Didn’t Compare Senate Race to Fighting Nazis
But the quote has launched him even further into the political blogosphere
By LEANNE GENDREAU
Updated 6:40 AM EST, Thu, Oct 8, 2009
When Peter Schiff said he’d only be "interrupting" his financial career to be a U.S. senator from Connecticut, like soldiers who enlisted to fight the Nazis, he became a blogosphere celebrity.
But, Schiff said the comments have been blown a little bit out of proportion and he is not comparing running for the Senate to fighting Nazis.
Schiff, who runs Euro Pacific Capital, is best known for predicting the economic collapse and for being an adviser to Ron Paul during his presidential run. He is now a potential Republican challenger to Sen. Chris Dodd in 2010.
What launched the latest buzz is his recent interview with the Washington Post about his campaign.
“I'm interrupting my career. It's not like I want my new career in politics. But I'm willing to interrupt it the same way that somebody interrupted their career and joined World War II and went off to fight the Nazis. I don't think that I'm that heroic, and I don't think I'm risking as much as a soldier. But it's the same principle,” Schiff said.
The Senate race is getting a lot of attention because Dodd is considered to be quite vulnerable this time around and some high-profile people, including former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, are entering the race. Hence, the flurry of comments calling Schiff a Nazi hunter and other such things.
What Schiff meant, he said in a recent YouTube post, was that some people spend their lives in the military, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but there are others who interrupt their careers and sign up for a tour of duty, and that is what he would be doing.
“That happened a lot in the Second World War because we had a cause worth fighting for and a lot of professionals left their careers to join the military,” he said. “What I said in the reference is that I am doing something similar. ... I am not a career politician.”
He went on to say that career politicians cannot solve the problems he wants to solve because solving them means risking you won’t get re-elected, and he said he’s not interested in being a career politician.
The Hartford Courant spoke with Schiff’s brother, Andrew Schiff, who said the blogoshere reaction to that comment has been "kind of blown out of proportion. The Left made a pretty big deal about that. It's pretty silly. The analogy is that Peter said 'I’m not a professional politician but I'm willing to make a sacrifice.' It's like during the war and they were not professional soldiers."
You can watch the video here. To get to the response part, fast-forward to about the 3-minute mark.
First Published: Oct 7, 2009 11:03 AM EST
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