Question & Answer with President Clinton
MR. JOHN PODESTA: I always aspired to be Jack Valenti and come out and read some cards. And the president has agreed to take some questions, and we’ve taken the questions from students who are mostly in the upper reaches there, and I get the good fortune to read them, so I’m going to read them and then let the president answer them.
This one is from Tim Middleton at the Georgetown University Law Center. “The Clinton Global Initiative has emphasized the importance of solving problems through concrete, measurable steps. In regard to one of this year’s focus areas – mitigating religious/ethnic conflict – what concrete and measurable steps do you envision?”
PRESIDENT CLINTON: First of all, it’s obviously harder to measure concrete results in an effort to promote religious reconciliation than in climate change, AIDS, TB, malaria, the alleviation of poverty, and one of the reasons that I was almost loath to undertake making that a part of the CGI. But since these religious and related differences fuel so much of the political and the economic and social turmoil in the world today, I thought we had to do it.
The second problem with measuring that is that it’s so tied to politics that no matter what you do, political leaders can undo what you do. For example, I’ll just give you the simplest one I can think of. We had a wonderful, wonderful man who wanted to promote better relationships between Palestinian and Israeli and other Arab children, and believe it or not he actually organized basketball tournaments in the Middle East. And they played, and it worked. But how do you measure whether it was good or not when the president of the Palestinian Authority asked the leader of Hamas to join a national unity government and they say yes and then they say no, so now nobody is talking to anybody else again. Was it worth doing? Yeah, I still think it was.
But I think the only thing you can do is count how many lives you touched and wait for the results; that is, we have all kinds of religious dialogue. I’ve got a Christian evangelical friend who’s establishing with some Moroccan Muslim scholars a Christian-Muslim dialogue in the Middle East. How do I measure the success? I don’t know that it’s measurable. I can only tell you when they finish how many people have talked to how many others and what they intend to do to follow up. But I am quite sure that in the aggregate the more connections we establish, the better off we are. And so I’m doing this, but I readily admit that it’s the least measurable of all of my efforts.
I’ll give you one other example. A couple years ago the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution sponsored a religious reconciliation forum in Qatar, and among the people that were there, the head of a religious party in political opposition to President Musharraf in Pakistan – a very fundamentalist Muslim, devoutly religious man. So I thought to myself, how is this guy going to react to this? And I said it seemed to me that the most prevalent religious heresy all across the world today – a heresy in Christendom, a heresy in Judaism, a heresy in Islam, a heresy among the Hindus and the Buddhists – was the idea that anybody could be in full possession of the truth and make it a – and from that develop a fully true political program that anyone who rejected was less than human for doing so. And I cited the Dhammapada of the Buddha, I cited a Sura from the Koran, I cited a provision of the Torah, and I cited St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians when he said, “In this life we all see through a glass darkly and know in part.” And I thought – and I said it’s just arrogant to present otherwise, and the guy gave me a standing ovation. I was shocked.
But I did it not by attacking Islam, but by acknowledging the tendency we all have to see ourselves as right. So you can’t keep score in a traditional way there. I wish I could. But I still think we should keep working on this because at least we’re creating little networks of people that expand by some factor the space that political leaders will have to operate in all across the world if they choose to do the right thing.
MR. PODESTA: Thank you. This one is from that great student, Anon. “It seems that inequality of wealth has contributed to the erosion of the common good, dividing our nation. What could be done to reverse these trends?”
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I think the single most important thing we can do in America to reverse inequality, I’d say based on my experience – I just saw Gene Sperling here, who was my national economic advisor and had helped me put together my first economic program. You can do a lot with the tax system, like you can raise the minimum wage. You can increase the Earned Income Tax Credit. You could do what Bruce and Rahm Emanuel have suggested, which is to collapse all these – the Earned Income Tax Credit and all these other things into a family tax credit and make it refundable. All of that would diminish inequality. But the most important thing we have to do is to recognize that in an open economy if you’re richer than someone else who’s as smart as you are, you have to find a source of new jobs every five to eight years to keep your wage levels high.
I mean, I met a guy the other day that had been to India for hip replacement surgery. That’s a whole separate problem. That’s because in America we let the healthcare financing tail wag the healthcare dog. That’s one thing I disagree on. I’m glad USA Today is running this series on it, but it’s not true that the insurance system is not the primary culprit. About 35 to 40 percent of the disparity between our expenditures and others are directly related to the way we finance healthcare.
But the point is, somebody in India can do hip surgery just as well as somebody in America can, and now they’ve got all these certified hospitals and insurers literally are insuring companies and giving them lower rates when they insure their employees if for certain sorts of expensive procedures they send them overseas now. And there’s now an International Registry of Hospitals. Most of them are in India and Thailand I think, but not entirely. There are others, too. You get on the list for a certain kind of procedure and then it’s, believe it or not, sometimes cheaper to buy your employee a plane ticket to go there and a hotel room and the whole nine yards. But the point is, that outsourcing – we can change things, but we have got to find a source of new jobs every five to eight years.
I would like to tell you that every good thing that happened to the economy was because of things that Bob Rubin and Gene Sperling and I did. I’d like to tell you that, but it’s not true. We had the highest percentage of jobs created in the private sector in my eight years of any time in 70 years, and I wanted it that way. What happened? In my second term we finally got the full benefit of the job engine of the ‘90s which was the explosion of information technology out of the Silicon Valley dot-com companies and the Texas video game companies into every aspect of American activity so that almost no jobs in any part of American life looked the way they did or ten or 15 years ago now because information technology has rifled through the economy. It was only about 8 percent of our jobs, but it accounted for 30 percent of our growth, and they were all upper-end jobs which pulled the weight scale up and created a very tight labor market.
The fundamental problem is we haven’t found that answer here to inequality. So government policies can reduce inequality, but we also need new jobs that pay well. And the lay down, obvious, sitting here, slapping-us-in-the-face answer is to make a commitment to a clean, independent energy future. It will create millions of jobs, and many of them are not exportable. I just agreed to work with this large cities group that includes now 32 – we’ll soon have 35 or 36 – of the 40 biggest cities in the world, and then we added some more. Philadelphia is a part of it as well as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. We got Philadelphia in and I got New Orleans in because I want to help them with the redevelopment. But the money here to be made and the jobs to be created are staggering.
And I’ll just give you one example. I was in Denmark a couple of weeks ago. In the last few years their economy has increased by 50 percent. Their energy use during the same time frame increased by zero – nothing. They invested in conservation. They kept jobs. Their unemployment rate is about what ours is, but their wages are rising and inequality is going down because of a combination of new jobs and government policy.
Same thing happened in the U.K., the economy most like ours of all the European economies. They’ve had rising wages and declining inequality because they’re going to beat their Kyoto targets by 50 percent and they created all these new jobs in doing that. So whether its biofuels, conservation, wind, solar – you name it – we are making a big, big mistake not getting after this big time, not only because of climate change and national security implications, but because that’s where the jobs were. If I were here like I was 15 years ago as a candidate I would say to the American people, “If you want to do this in a big way, vote for me; if you don’t, find somebody else because this is all I’m going to work on till I get it figured out.” (Laughter.) Because this is just a huge opportunity.
MR. PODESTA: Mister President, last question we’re going to give to the faculty. Peter Rubin asks, “How should candidates who espouse the common good respond to negative ads and attacks, the politics of fear used so successfully by their opponents?”
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, first of all, I guess I should show – I’ve been saying everybody else should be humble. I guess I should be humble a little bit. I once got – I was defeated in the 1980 Reagan landslide running for reelection as governor. I became the youngest former governor in American history – (laughter) – a person with very uncertain prospects. And for a long time I went around and just whined about, you know, how negative these ads were. It was the first – the advent – the first time we really had serious, big-time negative ads in a campaign in my state, at least that were unrelated to race. We had race-baiters going all the way back to the ‘50s, but I mean serious using of television to do negative ads.
And there were two negative ads that were run against me: one for raising the car license fee to have a road program, and the other, I was blamed because President Carter closed down all the Cuban refugee centers around America and sent the remaining Cuban refugees to Arkansas after they had rioted in Arkansas and he had promised not to send any more. So I went around, and then this guy who was a friend of mine heard me complaining about this one day about three months after I was out of office. He said, “Bill, you don’t understand. Those weren’t negative ads to the people that agreed with them. They were positive ads.” (Laughter.) They were going to get their car license lowered and there’d be no more Cubans here.
I’m just saying, how should you respond? My view is you should first ask yourself, is this a total diversion or is this something – or is he or she attacking me because they genuinely advocate a different policy that will have different consequences? Is the ad true or false? And is the ad going to work?
First of all, if it’s going to work you should respond to it. This is a contact sport – politics. And you can’t complain about being attacked. It’s like Yao Ming complaining about being fouled playing basketball. I’m 7'7”, why are they are hitting me? Because you’re 7'7” and we’ve got to get you out of the way. (Laughter.) Right? It’s like Newt Gingrich said to me one time, “I hate how mean we are to you, but if I fought you fair you’d beat us every time.” (Laughter.) I mean, you know? So you’ve got to – how many times have – (applause). How many times have you seen – how many times have you been pulling for one side or another in a football game and you see a guy commit pass interference and he shouldn’t have done it, but it saved a touchdown. I mean, these things happen in the heat of battle.
So the first thing you say is, is this going to work? And if it is, I’m going to answer it. Now, second thing is, is it true what they’re saying? Have they truthfully stated my position and my opponent’s position? If they falsely stated it, my recommendation is the answer should say you should almost advertise the other ad. Let’s suppose John Smith is running against me. And I would run an ad that says, “Have you seen John Smith’s ad claiming that Bill Clinton wants to give arms to terrorists?” (Laughter.) “Well, here are the facts, one, two, three. If you can’t trust a guy to tell you the truth in a campaign, how can you trust him to be governor or president,” whatever, if it’s not true? If it is true you should say, “Have you seen this ad? Here’s his position. He’s told you the truth about my position but not about the consequences. Here’s why I think I’m right and they’re wrong.” In other words, make the ad an extension of the debate.
But I think if a person runs an ad just saying you’re a slug, then, you know, you don’t necessarily have to defend yourself, but usually those ads are false in some meaningful way. And so I used to never start it, I would just always try to finish it by saying, “Have you seen so-and-so’s ad? Here’s the truth.” And then once you do that enough, then their negative ad becomes a positive ad for you and people trust you more because you invite them to look at the other guy’s ad. That’s what I would do.
But what do I know? I’m not running for anything anymore. (Laughter.)
(Applause.)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. Bless you.
(Sustained applause.)
(END)