A clear voice of reason amid the rancour
I would like to say that I’ve been stiffed by better men than former president Bill Clinton. But that wouldn’t be true. Blown off by the most charismatic man in the world.
I’m crushed.
It was the interview that wasn’t — a one- on- one with the 42nd president of the United States, in Toronto yesterday to deliver the keynote speech at a motivational seminar called “ The Power Within: A Passion For Life,’’ sponsored in part by the Star. No time for a private chat — despite the fellating email I’d sent him a week ago — because of scheduling pressures, his handlers explained. Sorry.
Like Hillary Clinton, I forgive him.
We’ll always have Rome – where I ( literally) bumped into Clinton earlier this year at the Trevi Fountain. And Durban, South Africa, where I once meandered onto a studio set ( so much for security) and became part of a Q & A session on AIDS that the president was taping with a group of pre-selected young people. And New York City, where I stood in the rain at the front of a media pen — reach-out-and-touch distance — as Clinton arrived to sign copies of his just- released autobiography. And New York again, where I just happened to find myself when Clinton had his heart bypass surgery last summer, assuming the wait-forword position with other reporters outside his hospital.
Perhaps he thinks I’m stalking him?
It says much about the quality of leadership that Clinton, five years removed from the Oval Office, remains the most popular statesman on the planet, trusted despite his infamous — and hysterically dramatized ( by that vast right- wing conspiracy) — lapses in judgment, and a oneman font of humanitarian enterprise.
For AIDS, he’s there. For the victims of last year’s tsunami, he’s there. For the wretchedly displaced of Hurricane Katrina, he’s there. For the poor in developing nations, he’s there. For debt relief, he’s there. For the Kyoto Accord his nation won’t ratify, he’s there. Heck, even for Canada’s trade dispute over softwood tariffs with the U. S., he’s there. And for simple optimism — faith in a better world, even in the midst of politics- by- terror — he’s there. He is, once and again, the man who accepted his party’s presidential nomination by saying: “ I still believe in a place called Hope.’’ And not just his hometown of Hope, Ark.
It’s this optimism, I think, this voice of reassuring reason against the cacophony of rancour and divisiveness, that Clinton projects so well. And why he would, without doubt, win the Oval Office again if the election rules in the United States allowed it. Every public opinion poll says so. Gone is the polarizing impact that Clinton once had in his own America, even as he was spinning accords and promoting conciliation for warring factions elsewhere. Public discourse has become more rancid since Clinton’s two terms in the White House and who would have thought that possible? Whitewater seems like a hill of beans, in retrospect, and a presidential dalliance with an intern an absurd judicial obsession. He has retired from politicking, not from public life. The world has become Clinton’s stage.
This is why William Jefferson Clinton attracts such humongous crowds at his speaking appearances — 8,000 yesterday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, on the back end of a onetwo engagement north of the border.
“ You’ll have me thinking I’m the president again,’’ Clinton kidded, to a roaring welcoming ovation.
“ This country I love and this city I cherish,’’ he said of us, and we didn’t mind that he probably says the same thing to all the girls. “I’m always very happy here in Canada. There are probably about half of my fellow countrymen who would like me to stay.’’
Ba- da- boom.
“ And there were times when I’ve wanted to stay.’’
Speaking extemporaneously, weaving personal anecdotes and hard data through his 40minute delivery, emphasizing points with his delicate musician’s hands, Clinton rejected the creeping pessimism that he thinks afflicts a world short on patience. Remember how far we’ve come, he reminded, just from 1989 when the Berlin Wall was toppled, the political rapprochement with Russia, China’s embrace of a free market economy, the simple global empathy among societies, the acknowledgment that people in Third World countries are entitled to better than what they’ve got.
“ It is a great privilege to care about them as well as an obligation. This is not a time to be pessimistic.’’
This is a world of growing global interdependence, he said, and mutual need — for capital, for labour, for productivity, for multilateralism. “ The success of modern Canada is in part due to the increase in global interdependence.’’
Yet half of the world, he said, “ feels totally left out of positive globalization’’ because those societies have received pitifully little benefit from it: Half of the world’s people living on $2 ( U. S.) a day; 1.5 billion with no clean drinking waters; a quarter of the child mortality rates — from AIDS, malaria, infectious diseases — attributable to the lack of clean water to drink. “ Ten million children will die of completely preventable diseases, and not one single death from those diseases will be in Canada or the U. S.’’
It is tempting, he cautioned, to take backward steps on a planet gone mad with terrorism, even if security is the most pressing problem the world faces, which he agreed was the case. It would be catastrophic if Al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization got its hands on just a “cookie-sized’’ lump of fissile material to make just one clumsy weapon of mass destruction.
Yet. “No terrorist movement has ever replaced one country, in all of history, acting on its own.’’
And: “ It’s not possible to kill or occupy all our enemies.’’
Convincing those who look different from us, in the West, who worship their Creator differently, that they can be brought into “ a wider circle of opportunity’’ is a crucial part of diffusing ill- will. “ We know how to do this. . . . We can do this right. . . . We have no excuse now for building a world without fewer terrorists.’’
Clinton recalled how an African woman had once rushed to present him with a shirt she had sewn at her village co- operative, which had been established with American funds. He hung that shirt in a place where he’d see it every day. “ It reminds me that that woman was not mad at me or mad at the U. S. or mad at the West. She knew we wanted her to be part of a shared future.’’
It will be increasingly the task of individuals and non- governmental organizations and multilateral institutions to bridge the gulf between societies, said Clinton. And there will be failures. There will be disagreements.
“ You can’t be impatient when things don’t go your way overnight, when it may take 10 years, or 20 or 30 or a lifetime to make a difference. The bigger your hopes and dreams, the larger your pain.
“ You have to be able to live with pain, you have to be able to live with humiliation.
“ And I know a little bit about both.’’