Campus Progress National Student Conference
Swarthmore College Keynote Address

Speakers:

Stephanie Nyombayire, Student, Swarthmore College
John D. Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
Keisha Senter, Campus Speakers Bureau Coordinator, Center for American Progress

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Transcript provided by DC Transcription & Media Repurposing

KEISHA SENTER: Hi, everyone. Hello? If I can get you all to quiet down just a little. I hope you all are enjoying the conference so far. We are extremely excited to have each one of you here today. All of you are dynamic, young, progressive leaders. In fact, we had to shut down the conference registration a month ago due to overwhelming demand, but you guys made it, so have fun, learn as much as possible, and try to meet as many people as you can. I’m going to try myself, too.

I am Keisha Senter. As the Speakers Bureau coordinator for Campus Progress, I get to mix all kinds of issues, experts, and artists to create some really awesome events and I absolutely love it. We’ve held more than 60 events across the country in our first semester, including Al Sharpton and Armstrong Williams at Howard University, debates about John Bolton at Brown University and Ohio State University, and filmmakers presenting important films on subjects from the murder of Emmitt Louis Till to Michael Moore’s visit to Utah, to a struggle over sex education and gay rights in a Texas community.

As for me, when I was in college I thought I was going to be a biologist dissecting frogs and all of that and my mom wanted me to be a doctor, except for one small detail: that’s not my passion. This is. You guys are. So what does my story have to do with you? It means that I am one of you and I am telling you to follow your passion: connect, engage and speak up. We can help you organize debates, lectures, films, performances, workshops, and whatever else to help get your progressive message across, for when we win the battle of ideas, we can change the world.

And speaking of changing the world, let me introduce three world changers: our leader at the Center for America Progress, John Podesta; one of my new heroes, Stephanie Nyombayire; and finally – I got to tell you, over the past semester you all called Campus Progress and wanted us to get you certain speakers most of all. You wanted Oprah Winfrey; some asked for Tom Cat (ph). One person even asked for Ashley Olsen, but there was one name that came up more than any other. I didn’t get any of those other speakers, but today I am proud to say that we have the speaker you really wanted, someone who knows a little something about leadership and policy and politics and just about everything else. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Podesta, Stephanie Nyombayire, and President William Jefferson Clinton. (Applause.)

Okay. You all can, you can take your seats. He is going to be out in one second. (Laughter.) When it comes to connecting at the Center for American Progress, John Podesta is all about connecting, and how we do it is what drives him. He founded the Center for American Progress after being chief of staff for President Clinton. Prior to his stint to the White House, John did a range of jobs on Capitol Hill. For example, counselor to Senator Thomas Daschle and chief counsel for the Senate Agricultural Committee. Let me tell you a little something about John. He walked into our last conference meeting yesterday and we were all stressed out and frazzled, and he was like, “Hey, why aren’t you all smiling?” And then, he walked out chuckling with a big smile on his face. Well, John, we might have been stressed out then, but we’re all smiling now.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming my boss, John Podesta. (Applause.)

JOHN PODESTA: Thank you. We had to call it (audible ?) there for a second, but I think that President Clinton and Stephanie are now outside and let me introduce them. Yes? There they are. (Applause.)

Thank you all and I can’t tell you how proud I am of welcoming you to the first ever Campus Progress National Student Conference. You know, I heard – I sat in this morning and heard about how conservative groups have pumped resources – over $37 million a year – to push their policies on America’s college campuses. We’ve also said, I think, this morning that Campus Progress wants to pursue some of the same kinds of activities that the right’s been engaged in, like communicating ideas and promoting new leaders and bringing people together across single-issue divides to create a larger progressive movement, but I’ve got a little concern about all of this because you have to kind of look at the products of the conservative campus machine.

We saw the quotes from Ann Coulter or then there is Dinesh D’Souza, and of course there is Karl Rove, the 1973 chairman of College Republicans. As they used to say in my day, he’s got some explaining to do. Kind of makes you wonder what their seminars looked like. You’ve got a whole range of them this afternoon: how to smear an ambassador, how to lie from the White House press podium without your nose growing long. Well, I’ve had some success in this business and I want to tell you, you can fight hard for what you believe without breaking the law, without cheating, and certainly without checking your morals at the door. (Applause.)

I think we’re about to see a new day in American politics because the news today is that progressive students are organizing. The news today is that they are mobilizing. The news is that the far right has had its say and now it’s your turn, and helping make your voice heard is what the Center for American Progress and Campus Progress are all about. I hope this fall and in the years to come you’ll work with Campus Progress; publish in blog on campusprogress.org; work with us to start a publication on your campus and to bring speakers to your campus; work with us to create a true community of progressives and stand up for positive change on all the issues that matter.

Forty years ago when he accepted the Nobel Peace Price, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their body, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” The reason you are here today is because you share that audacity to believe. You have the audacity to believe that we can build a more just, a more prosperous, a more inclusive America. You have the audacity to believe that we can again lead the world through the strength of our vision and the power of our ideals. And you have the audacity to believe that it may take some time, but if we stand together and work together, we could turn our country around.

One way we’ll succeed is by riding the waves of new technologies and innovation. Ten years ago there weren’t many multimedia web publications. Now we can bring students and student publications together at campusprogress.org. New groups like MoveOn and tools like Meetup can bring people together not only online, but face-to-face to mobilize for change. Today, someone like my friend Laurie David, who is alarmed over global warming and outraged over the indifference to it demonstrated by so many of our leaders, can mobilize the world in a flash. She is doing it with the virtual march on Washington to stop global warming. Check it out, please. It’s stopglobalwarming.org and please join the march.

I think you share the belief that individuals can make a difference. If you do, I have one thing to tell you, you’re right. I could say that because as one of the earlier generations of activists, I’ve seen how young people are able to put their dreams to work. I’ve seen them build their skills on campus, learn to organize, become involved in the political process, and make progressive change happen. Where did they end up? Some went on to become legislators, some became mayors, some became union leaders, some became priests, some became rabbis, some became ministers, and one – only one – went on to become the president of the United States.

I met him in 1970 when I was in college and he was in law school, which makes him, of course, much older than me. (Laughter.) We both believe that politics could make the lives of ordinary people better and could make America better. I’ve been fortunate to work with him since then and we are all fortunate that he is with us today because whether it’s winning healthcare for millions of children, standing up for racial equality, protecting a worker’s right to join a union, fighting HIV/AIDS or waking this country up to the threat of global warming, Bill Clinton never forgot where he came from and he stayed true to progressive values that we share. He still does that today.

We’re all aware that he is now leading the UN’s effort to rebuild the regions devastated by the tsunami, but that’s only part of his work. Through the William J. Clinton Foundation, he is mobilizing world support to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. He has launched an important new economic development initiative in Harlem and he is continuing his efforts to promote public service.

To present President Clinton, please join me in welcoming an outstanding young woman from Swarthmore College, who is a founder of the Genocide Intervention Fund, a student-run group actively trying to bring an end to the genocide in Darfur. Stephanie comes from Rwanda. (Applause.) She is going to – Stephanie is going to tell you a little bit about her personal story. It’s one of great courage and strength, and today she is devoting her energy to fighting for a safer and better world for others threatened by hate and violence. The Center for American Progress has been an enthusiastic supporter of the work of Stephanie and the other leaders of the Genocide Intervention Fund, and to me their commitment, their passion has come to embody what progressive student activism is at its best. Please welcome; join me in welcoming Stephanie Nyombayire. (Applause.)

STEPHANIE NYOMBAYIRE: Good afternoon, everyone. As Mr. Podesta said, my name is Stephanie Nyombayire and I am currently a student of Swarthmore College, but I’m originally from Rwanda. Eleven years ago, over 100 of my family members, including my grandparents, my aunts and uncles along with their children were killed during the Rwandan genocide: the most systematic, fastest, and most well organized genocide known to history. In just 100 days, Hutu extremists picked up machetes, clubs, and any weapons they could find and slaughtered half of the Tutsi population and moderate Hutus, while the international community sat by and watched.

Today, it is my honor to introduce the first and only president who had the courage to honor and to stand up for the million Rwandan lives lost and to apologize for the world’s inaction. However, President Clinton did not stop by apologizing, but has since worked relentlessly to ensure that the people of Rwanda are never again abandoned. His foundation, the William J. Clinton Foundation is helping Rwanda implement a five-year plan to fight against the HIV/AIDS. He is also currently working with the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV to fight and provide treatment for HIV positive children, to over 2 million of them, in Africa.

This willingness to stand up and fight for what we believe in must be the hallmark of the student progressive community. For me, this means doing everything in my power to ensure that we do everything we can to help put an end to the Darfur genocide because as we speak 400,000 people have died and more than two million have been displaced. We at Swarthmore College, thanks to the support of the Center for American Progress, have created the Genocide Intervention Fund. The Genocide Intervention Fund has engaged and empowered citizens to have a hand in putting an end to genocide. Our efforts have raised close to a quarter million dollars in support of the African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, as well as for lobbying and public awareness campaigns throughout the country.

We’re also launching a new online campaign this week with the American Progress Action Fund. Through this campaign, beawitness.org, we’re urging the television networks to increase their broadcast and their coverage of the Darfur genocide because citizens will not and cannot act if they don’t even know about it. We believe that we must refuse to let the words “never again” continue to be void of meaning because, as President Clinton stated in his 1998 address to Rwanda, “We must and we owe it to those who have died, and to those who survived who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who commit such atrocities.”

And it is for this reason that I would like to ask each and every one of you sitting in this room – students, educators and policymakers – to follow the honorable path that President Clinton has chosen so many times and to stand up and fight against the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Through his never ending efforts in combating global problems such as hunger and HIV, as well as to his tireless dedication to providing help and assistance in times of crisis, President Clinton is showing the world that it is not enough to speak out against an issue: instead, we must all follow our words with action. And through his words and his action, Mr. Clinton has surely offered the world an example that I hope each and every one of you here will follow.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming President Clinton. (Sustained applause.)

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Stephanie, not only for that wonderful introduction, but for your work. I am just about to go back to Rwanda. Friday night, I’m on my way back to Africa to see the places where we’re working and I will see John Podesta’s daughter, who is working with our foundation against AIDS in the Lesotho. So I am delighted to be here with them.

I want to tell you that John Podesta did a magnificent job as White House chief of staff. We had been friends since 1970. We both looked a lot – well, different anyway, 35 years ago. I was laughing, you know, for most of my life I was the youngest person doing whatever I was doing. One day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room I entered, and I see that that has not changed today, so I am delighted to be here and very grateful for the work John is doing is here and the work that he is doing on environmental causes: another passion that we both share.

You’ve had a lot people who I have been associated with already appear here: Paul Begala, Dee Dee Myers, Susan Rice, Carole Browner, my great friend, Congressman John Lewis. You had Thomas Frank, who wrote that wonderful book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? I loved his analysis of the Republicans. I didn’t agree with what he said about my trade policy and if you want me to discuss that, I’ll do it. (Laughter.) But it’s still a book very much worth reading.

I would like to sort of shorten the remarks that I had intended to give and give more time for questions so we can speak more about what you’re interested in, but there are two or three things that I would like to say by way of introduction.

The first relates to what Stephanie said about the work that I am now doing on tsunami relief for the UN and with my AIDS project, and it is this: you don’t have to wait till your party’s in power to have an impact on life at home and around the world. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, three sweeping historical developments have occurred which have changed forever the potential of your generation. The first is that, for the first time in history more than half the people of the world live under governments they voted in. And that’s quiet a statement when you consider the fact that China is not yet a democracy even though they have genuine elections in over 900,000 small villages and only the governors of the biggest – the mayors of the biggest cities are appointed. That doesn’t guarantee you good government, but it does guarantee that you can get rid of bad government, and that is an important thing.

The second significant development is the explosive power of the internet. When I became president, believe it or not, in 1993, January, when the average cell phone still weighed 5 pounds, there were only 50 sites in the internet: 50. When I left there were 50 million – in eight years – and now there’s, of course, many multiples of that. It’s almost as if you don’t have your own web page, you’re not – you don’t have an identity anymore.

That also has changed things. Do you remember when the SARS epidemic came out in Hong Kong and then in Tokyo? In the beginning, the Chinese government was sort of in denial and you can’t handle an epidemic unless all hands on deck are cooperating aggressively. SARS has the potential to kills hundreds of thousands of people in a hurry. There was a citizen revolt in China led by young people; this time not in Tiananmen Square, but over the internet. A flood of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of messages hammering into the Chinese websites and all of a sudden the Chinese government changed its position, began to cooperate, including with the American Center for Disease Control, the Canadian authorities, and the SARS epidemic will shut down in one of the classic examples of how a potential tragedy ought to be handled, all generated by ordinary Chinese people over the internet.

And the third thing that has happened is the growth of the nongovernmental organizations, the NGOs; people who were standing in the gaps between ordinary citizens’ lives and unfettered behavior of the free market and whatever the government policy is in whatever country you’re talking about. The biggest NGO in the world is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They have spend a billion and a half dollars in India and Africa alone on healthcare. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on education in America trying to modernize our high schools and make them more globally competitive – very important. But there are a lot of NGOs that you never hear about that are also changing the lives of every person they touch. One with which I’ve had the privilege of working, as well as Hillary, is the Self-Employed Women’s Association, SEWA, in India, which has literally revolutionized the lives of not only a lot of poor women in Indian villages, but the villages themselves by providing microcredit and other supports to diversify and lift the economies among poor people.

And I remember one day two or three years ago I was shaving in the morning and I looked in the mirror and I thought, my God, I have become an NGO. And somehow I never thought about it before, but I realized, you know, when I left the White House, I was too young to retire and not good enough to either play my saxophone or take my golf clubs around on a professional basis, so I had to keep working. And I tried to define what I could do that would be of some enduring value, whether or not I agreed with the policies of my government or any other one. So I began to work on providing economic opportunity in America and around the world, on trying to deal with the AIDS crisis, and working in a private capacity for religious and racial and ethnic reconciliation, and also trying to help countries with their governance issues, trying – because there is a lot of talk in the papers today about corruption in poor countries. And it is a big source of discussion, you know, around the G8 meeting in Gleneagles. You know, will this aid do any good if these countries are corrupt? I would say, based on my experience, which is fairly substantial, that lack of capacity is a bigger problem than corruption in most new democracies and that the lack of capacity leads to corruption. If people think that a government can’t function anyway and their problems can’t be solved anyway, it’s easy to sort of slip into the path of least resistance. So I work on these things and you can, too.

That’s the first thing I want to tell. You do not have to wait to be satisfied with the results of any election to have an impact on the future. You heard Stephanie talking about Darfur. That is a classic example.

The second thing I would like to say is a little something about politics. There are all a lot of problems which cannot be solved without appropriate government policy. We have been engaged in this country in a huge debate that has become increasingly polarized. It really began in the 1960s. The country had more or less a consensus about how we ought to be governed all during the New Deal and World War II. It began to break apart in Harry Truman’s presidency when he lost the Congress in part for trying to give the American people healthcare: same reason I lost it. That ought to tell you something about what’s the matter with our politics. It happened twice in 50 years.

But we built up another consensus after John Kennedy was assassinated, and it came apart again over our differences over the Vietnam War, civil rights, the rise of women, Roe v. Wade, and a lot of other cultural issues. And then, in the late ‘70s, the so-called religious right rose and merged with the ideological conservatives and Main Street Republicans to bring President Reagan to office in the 1980 elections. And we had the first round of supply-side economics, which is that arithmetic doesn’t matter anymore. Economics is theology, taxes are evil and bad, there is no such thing as a bad tax no matter how much money you spend as a good tax. And we’ve been fighting this ever since in fits and starts.

This has worked dramatically to the advantage of the Republicans because they started realizing they were in an intellectual hole in the 1960s and they have been working for 40 years to shape the debate. And one of the things they’ve done is to shape the way that our friends in the mainstream media write stories. So, for example, if you are a Democrat and you have sort of normal impulses, you’re a sell-out. Like when Hillary said abortion is a tragedy for virtually everybody who undergoes it and we ought to do what we can to reduce abortions, because the Republicans have hammered the debate and divided the country in the minds – in the mind, not in reality – in the minds of the people who write about it. All of a sudden, is she selling out? Is she abandoning her principles? But if John McCain, who is pro-life, works with Hillary on global warming, he is a man of principle moving to the middle. If President Bush appoints a moderate to the Supreme Court, we won’t say he sold out the right. We’ll say, oh, how grand it is! Right? But if you are a Democrat and you talk to somebody in the middle: oh, my God, you have no convictions, you have no backbone and you never believed anything. That is a tribute to the relentless power of 40 years of intellectual argument and bifurcating the thought process of virtually everybody who writes and thinks about politics in America, and it violates human nature, it violates the facts before us, and its nuts, which is why it’s a good thing you’re here.

When Hillary made this speech – well, there was one great article in the New Republic by Peter Beinart who actually went to the trouble to go back and look at what she had said and done for the last 25 or 30 years and he said, whoa, there’s a remarkable consistency here. A young man named Andrew Churney (ph) did the same thing on my records. He said, “How can you say Clinton had no consistency in conviction? You may not agree with him, but he’s basically said and done the same thing for 30 years.”

And that is a profoundly important thing. If you win the battle of ideas, it may have the unintended consequence of changing the sort of framework within which people view the other guys, too, so it’s is really important. You have to ask yourself – and you don’t have to agree with me, but first the beginning of an effective, progressive politics is the ability to answer for yourselves and to achieve some rough consensus on four questions. One, what is the status of the modern world? Where am I? What is the fundamental nature of the world I live in?

Two, what do I want it to look like when my children and grandchildren are (older?)? Three, what are the values that underlie this vision? And four, what is the strategy for getting there, including the role of government? You’ve got to be able to answer that. When President Reagan got elected he said the world is divided between good and evil: I’m for good. How do we get it? Low taxes and big defense spending and moving the country to a more socially conservative position. And essentially, President Bush had a modernized version of that, wrapped in the most brilliant political slogan in my lifetime, “compassionate conservatism,” which is the only way he could win since we had a 65 percent approval rating. It was, I’ll give you everything they did with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut. Wouldn’t you like that?

But the point is they understand these. They understand you have to ask and answer big questions and you have to understand what is the fundamental nature of the modern world? Interdependence, we cannot escape each other. Everybody knows what it means economically, everybody knows what it means on the internet, but there are a lot of negative interdependence examples. I mean, on 9/11 you had people from 70 countries, including over 200 other Muslims, murdered in New York City. Hillary and I visited an elementary school where the kids had to move their school. There were 600 kids from 80 different national and ethnic groups. Apparently, the people who did the London bombing were British citizens who were Muslims from Pakistan, at least that is what today’s stories are.

But the point is that this interdependence can be positive or negative, and I would argue that it is inherently unstable because it’s both positive and negative. That’s what I would argue. You don’t have to agree with me, but you have to have in your mind what is the fundamental character of the modern world?

Second question, where do you want it to go? What do you want it to look like when your kids and your grandchildren are alive? I answer that: I want us to move from interdependence to more integrated communities, locally, nationally and globally. What’s the definition of an integrated community? Shared responsibilities, shared benefits and opportunities, and shared values. That’s my answer to the second question.

What are those shared values? How in the world can you have shared values in a world as diverse as ours? Well, the answer to the first question is, you can’t if you believe you are in possession of the absolute truth and if you believe that that truth can be translated into a political program. Then all possibility of shared values vanishes because somebody that doesn’t agree with you on something is by definition outside the family of humanity. Then it’s okay to kill them if you are a terrorist, or just malign them if you are an extremist in America. But all you got to do is say, “I am a human being. I am subject to error. I might be wrong every now and then.” Then you can have shared values. Every person matters, every person deserves a chance, every person has a responsible role to play. Competition is good, but it only works within a community of established shared rules. Our differences are important. They do matter. They make life more interesting. But in the end, our common humanity matters more. That’s my answer.

That brings you the last question: what is the role of government? How do we get from here to there? My argument is that we get from here to there with the government that establishes the conditions and gives people the tools to fulfill those values, that has a security policy that deals with terror and weapons of mass destruction, that has a policy to make a world with more friends and fewer terrorists, because we cannot kill, jail, or occupy all our adversaries and if you cant do that you got to make a deal. That’s where politics comes in. That has a policy that builds international cooperation – institutional cooperation. The big difference between us and the Republics is not so much what we want to do, but how we want to do it in the world. And Madeline Albright – I can’t claim credit for this – she had best one-line description of it. She said “We favor a world where we cooperate when we can and act alone when we must. They favor a world where they act alone when then can and cooperate when they must.” Very important distinction. It’s why I signed Kyoto and they got out of it. I signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and they got out of it. I was for the International Criminal Court against war crimes and they weren’t. These are honestly held convictions. Why I wanted trade agreements with labor and environmental standards and the same enforcement, and this Dominican Republic-Central American Trade Agreement seemed to have labor and environmental standards, but took the enforcement out of it. It’s a whole different attitude, deeply held, honestly held on both sides.

But fundamentally, we believe that government is essential to creating the vision we want and enacting the values we want in our lives and that you have to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most with their own lives. And if you think about that and if you – that’s the way I think about everything. If you ask me any question today on any issue, my answer will be dictated by a course of action that I believe will give us more shared responsibility, shared benefits and opportunities, and a shared community of values because we’re having more diversity not just in the world, but in every community in America and across the globe.

Final question, and so we can talk about whatever issues you want. Final question: how do the Democrats win again? Jim Fallows has got a great article in the – I think the Atlantic Monthly or one of those magazines, which is an alleged memo to the president in 2012, and he said, you know, the first 12 years of this century have been a disaster. The Republicans couldn’t govern and the Democrats couldn’t get elected. So here is the mess we are in. The truth is that we are in better shape than it appears we are. The Congress is more evenly divided and because the Republicans have done the last reapportionment or two it’s harder for us to win back. And because smaller states are more likely to be red states, they have a big advantage in the Senate, which is not a democratic institution by the founders’ design.

But if you look at the national preferences, we are in way better shape than we were in the 1980s. President Carter won by two points in 1976 when he was a Southern governor, a born-again Christian, a graduate of the Naval Academy, and a peanut farmer. After Watergate, he won by two points. He should have won by 20 points, but the cultural aversion of white Protestants, especially married white Protestants, to voting for a Democrat was so deep he was actually – it was a triumph. Then in ‘80, ‘84 and ‘88, we never won more than ten states. In one of those elections, we won one state and the District of Columbia as I remember. In ‘72, we won one state and the District of Columbia. In ‘68, we would have been beaten badly if Wallace had not been in the race. So we won in ‘92, we won in ’96. The myth that we would not have won if Ross Perot hadn’t been in there is simply not true; all the exit polls show just the reverse.

Al Gore didn’t win by enough votes to stay out of the Supreme Court in 2000. That’s what happened there. And you can argue what we should or shouldn’t have done, but the truth is we had a plurality of 500,000 votes. And when John Kerry was defeated 51 to 48 in 2004, it was the smallest reelection margin for a president who got reelected since Woodrow Wilson in 1916, before World War One, so the idea that progressive politics is dead is wrong.

Now, on what do we have to do to win? And I know there is some debate about whether it is about economics or security. The truth is it’s about both. Don’t think about how politicians or journalists write and talk about politics; think about how people live politics. Think about how people experience reality. If we want to win again, I think we have to do four things.

Number one, we got to be credible on security. Number two, we’ve got to have good ideas on economic and social policy. Not just to be against the Republicans, but say what we would be for. You can win congressional races by just saying “no,” as Newt Gingrich proved in 1994. They just said “no” to me for two years. But when you win the White House you got to be for something because you are the leader of the band.

Number three, you have to have better tactics. It is impossible to describe to someone who has never been a part of it what is like to have the right wing go after you and tell the world that you are just no good. Your values are no good, you won’t stand up for America, you won’t fight for anything, you don’t believe in the family, and all that sort of stuff. But I don’t blame them anymore for doing that, because it just keeps working. Ask yourself this: if you had a business that you were running and it brought you a $100 million a year and you never had to change your business plan, both the public and, worse, your opponents reacted like Pavlov’s dog – totally predictably every time and said “Oh, how mean they are.” All you have to do is upgrade your – would you ever change your business plan? Of course you wouldn’t.

People come up to me all the time and say, “When is this mean partisanship going to come to an end?” And I say, “When it doesn’t work anymore. It will end when it doesn’t work anymore.” You can’t ask them to stop being mean with us because it works. (Laughter.) They will stop being mean to us on a human, personal level when it doesn’t work anymore and not until. And with their base, they never pay any price and it doesn’t matter whether what they say is true or not.

And you had two Catholic Bishops campaigning against Tom Daschle in 2004 telling people you couldn’t be a good Catholic and vote against him because he was a pro-choice Catholic Democrat when in fact for seven years Tom Daschle had tried to pass a bill imposing Roe v. Wade’s ban on third-trimester abortions except for the life or health of the mother was in danger on all 50 states. It doesn’t apply in about 10 states today where about 40 percent of the abortions are performed. It would have eliminated far more abortions than the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion bill, which, as another court just said, is manifestly unconstitutional. And we never got a vote on it in seven years. Why? Because the Republicans did not want the Democrats to be able to vote on anything that looked like it was a pro-life bill, but if the voters of South Dakota didn’t know that, they can’t be blamed. You have to advertise that.

You can’t blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity. (Laughter.) They are in business to beat us. We believe in shared opportunity; they believe that if you concentrate enough wealth and power in the hands of the right people you will have economic success, national strength, and a culturally conservative country that will be good for everybody. That’s what they believe, so they want to concentrate that. And if you want to beat it, you’ve got to be tough enough to beat it and that means you can’t let people maul you.

I will never forget Saturday before the election. I had one of these guys who was on the swift boat vote with Senator Kerry at a rally with me in Little Rock and he was a fine looking man. Boy, he looked like he could serve in the Navy today; I mean no fat, erect, crew cut. And he got tears in his eyes, talking with me he said, “Mr. President,” he said, “what kind of country do I live in where people who never served in Vietnam can be behind a campaign to malign John Kerry?” He said, “He saved my life not once but twice.” He said, “How do they get away with these lies?” And, you know, it was Saturday before the election. It was too late. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that most – a lot of what do you don’t remember anything about Vietnam and you have no way of knowing whether those charges are true or not. You’ve got to answer this stuff.

Not only that, people really don’t care if politicians attack each other with untrue stories. They figure if you don’t want to get hurt, you shouldn’t have filed for office. They figure whatever happens to us, our lives will be better than theirs. Half the time they like to see somebody hit us between the eyes with a two-by-four just to see how we react. (Laughter.) In other words, to use one of my wife’s phrases, the trick in politics is to take criticism seriously, but not personally. And if you take it personally, and you get to feelings hurt, and you act like a deer caught in a headlight, then you can’t take it seriously. Again, always see these things from how it looks out there to real people and real voters. Never launch a personal attack, but if one gets lobbed at you, knock it out of the park. Most of these personal attacks are Brer Rabbit things, don’t throw me in that brier patch. If you know how to answer it, you can hurt them worse than they intended to hurt you. But you got to have good tactics.

And the fourth thing I want to say is we have to talk to so-called red America. This is the nuttiest thing I ever saw to believe that – you know, we have – sometimes we have the political consultants say. okay, here are ten issues in the election and people agree with us on healthcare, education, the deficit, whether the tax cuts on wealthy people like Bill Clinton should be repealed. And they don’t agree with us on taxes on middle-class people. They think the Republicans are better on that and they think they are stronger on defense and we get a draw on crime and abortion is just explosive and while we have a slight advantage, there is great intensity on the other side, so for God’s sake don’t talk about it. So you analyze this and say, now, according to this poll we should talk about what they agree with us on and we will have some sort of answer on what we are losing on and we just try not to touch anything else, and we go where the votes are and dig them up. Nobody with any sense does that because that’s not how people are. We are all a little red and a little blue , as Barack Obama said in his speech.

I even saw a decision in the Supreme Court the other day, the first time in my life I think since they’ve been on there where I agreed with the dissent filed by Scalia and Thomas. I never thought it would happen. I wouldn’t make that old lady in Norwalk sell her house. She’d been in it since she was all 76 or 80 years old. I thought it was wrong. Maybe I’m wrong, but the point is we are complicated. Life is complicated and we’re the progressives: we don’t believe we have a monopoly on the truth, so it’s nuts for us not to talk to so-called red America. And besides that there is too many of them out there.

If you look at Ohio, a place where we won in ‘92 and ‘96, no Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio – ever. Senator Kerry ran way better than I did in Cleveland, but towns that I lost six to four, we lost four to one this time. I went after them. At my library dedication, which was very wet if you saw it, the last event was a woman singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and wet as it was she had a beautiful voice. We had been friends, that lady and I, for almost 30 years. She is the daughter of the man who ran the Pentecostal Church in my home state. He is a great friend of mine. I just talked to him the other day when his wife passed away. Her husband is one of the best friends I have got. He runs the biggest Pentecostal Church in Louisiana. Now, you wouldn’t think that a Democrat who had been derided as liberal, defamed as having no conviction, and is the world’s most famous sinner would have a friendship like that. This guy is my friend and we met on a very human level. Our children grew up at the same time; we’ve talked to one another about it. It never occurred to me that we shouldn’t be friends because of our politics.

So after the ceremony, we all went back. We were dripping wet and we went back to the apartment at the library. And I had all the participants from the event plus all the presidents and former presidents and their spouses and everybody up there. So the pastor comes up to me – he is from North Louisiana. He said, “I have got a confession to make.” I said, “This is great. I’ll live on this for the rest of my life: you confessing to me.” (Laughter.) I said, “What is it?” He said, “I voted for Bush.” I said, “Anthony, do you believe he was a good president?” He said, “I have very mixed feelings.” He said, “I have got mixed feelings about this Iraq thing. I hate those tax cuts. I don’t like the deficits. I think kicking all these poor kids out of after school programs is outrageous.” This guy had a very sophisticated understanding of what had happened.

I said, “Well, did you vote for him over the cultural issues – social issues?” He said, “No.” He said, “You know, I’m a Pentecostal preacher. I’m pro-life and anti-gay marriage.” But he said, “I voted for you twice. I’d vote for Hillary. I love her.” And he said, “I think I’m the only Pentecostal minister in the South ever to stand up and endorse the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.” I said, “You did that?” He said, “I did.” I said, “Why did you do that?” And he smiled and he said, “Because I (know you?).” And he said, “You’ve been talking to me about this for 20 years and I finally realized I couldn’t treat gay people as subhuman anymore; that they’re – if somebody is a good person and they obey the law, they’ve got to make the right to make a living and be treated decently in this society.” I said, “Well, Anthony, why did you vote for President Bush?” (Laughter.) And he said – listen to this – every one of you listen to this. He said, “Because ever since you left, nobody in your party talks to us anymore.” He said, “Bill, you can’t vote for somebody who doesn’t talk to you.” (Applause.)

Now, you think about that. And he said – and he said a really smart thing. He said, “Look, you can’t get James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.” And he said, “You shouldn’t, because they are not for you. You know, you shouldn’t. You guys don’t see the world the same way and they are not for you.” But he said, “Most of us evangelicals, we’re just trying to raise our children and hold our families and our community together in a hostile and very difficult environment.” And he smiled and he said – this guy’s a good politician – he said, “You don’t need many of us to win.” So I went back and checked: in ‘96 among white evangelical Protestants, Senator Dole beat me 63 to 37. In 2000, President Bush beat Vice President Gore, 74 to 26. In 2004, President Bush beat John Kerry, 78 to 21. Now, Kerry meanwhile, thanks to a lot of you, was doing much better in other places. The demographics of America have continued to move our way. We’ve had more young people organized and more people registered and more people are involved, but, you know, we can’t pretend that people that don’t agree with us on most things aren’t Americans, aren’t there, and don’t have a stake in our future, and that they are so different from us that none of them would have any interest in talking about. That’s just not true.

When Stephanie was introducing me, I learned something. When I tried to figure out – you know, I did – it’s true, I did go to Rwanda and apologize. It’s the biggest regret of my administration. We couldn’t have save most of the people because it happened so fast, but we could have saved some. And at the time we were reeling from Somalia and trying to get into Bosnia, which had gotten a lot of publicity, and we were trying to get in there and the world just missed it. Most countries, including the United States, never even had high-level meetings considering whether to send people, so we have come a long way. In Bosnia and Kosovo, even in Darfur there is an effort being made now, and I have some thoughts about that if you want to talk about it.

But I thought about that. When I went to Rwanda, I met all these survivors of the genocide who were working to help the country get put back together. And I met a lady – a beautiful women who said that she awoke in a pool of her own blood to find her husband and six children lying dead around her. And she first was angry at God for letting her survive, and then she said, “I realized I must have been spared for a purpose and it could not be something as mean as vengeance, so I do what I can to help us start again.” They have reconciliation villages in the Rwanda where the Hutus and the Tutsis get free land but only if they agree to live next door to one another. I went to a village called Ndera where there were two women neighbors holding hands: one of them lost her brother and husband in the genocide, the other’s husband was in prison awaiting trial for a war crimes tribunal and you’ve got to have done something really horrible to be called before the war crimes tribunal. They were neighbors. I met a Hutu women caring for two dying Tutsi boys who had a congenital disease, all living together.

Now, if they can do that, we can talk to red America. Give me a break here. And there is nothing wrong with that and there is no absence of conviction. (Applause.)

In the hills of North Central Africa, there are tribes who when they see each other walking on the paths and they greet each other, they have an important greeting. I want you all to remember this if you don’t remember anything else I say. When you see somebody on the road and they say “Hello,” instead of saying “Hello” back or “How are you?” or “Have a nice day,” the response in English is “I see you.” Just think about that. When you walk out of here today, look around the convention center and see all these people working here, think of how many people you pass on the street every day you never see.

You want to know how we can win again? We have got to be strong. We’ve got to have good ideas. We’ve got to have good tactics. And there can be no person we do not see.

Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. PODESTA: Well, we are going to do a little bit of a combination of Oprah and the Academy Awards. The president has agreed to take some questions and we have ended up – Price Waterhouse has selected a bunch of people for us through a lottery to do the questions. The first one is Michael Stallman (ph) from Bluffton University, who has a question about Darfur. I must say, Mr. President, we have collected some questions and about half of them I think were about Darfur today.

Q: You’re often quoted and you mentioned today that the Rwanda genocide was one of your greatest regrets during your presidency and now, as the same atrocities continue to unfold in Darfur, Sudan, where over 400,000 innocent civilians are raped and slaughtered daily as we sit here today in this conference and millions more are displaced causing today’s worst humanitarian crisis, I’m wondering if you would advocate a UN Chapter VII international intervention to stop the genocide before hundreds of thousands more innocent civilians are murdered?

PRES. CLINTON: The short answer is yes, but let’s talk about where we are in Darfur and how we got to where we are. First of all, the Sudanese basically – the Sudanese government virtually threatened the world community to have more violence unless only African troops went in there. The African union has sent like 7,400 troops in there, they are sending more; nowhere nearly enough. And the UN mandate is nowhere near strong enough. It should be expressly provided that they should protect civilians. Here is what I would like to see happen practically: I think that the UN mandate – and I think they can do it now, especially since the Sudanese won’t have the excuse of being preoccupied with the ongoing peace process. You know, John Garang is – they made their peace and they’ve – they are going to try to work together. My view is that we should get a broader UN mandate to expressly protect civilians. Then we should say we will give the African Union the opportunity to send enough troops in there with the commitment that the United States and NATO will provide adequate logistic support to get them in there, support them, to have communications, do whatever.

This is sort of what we did in East Timor by the way, where we had the ability to help the Australians and New Zealanders and others – troops from Southeast Asia – move into East Timor and I think it was – I believe we never had more than 500 troops there when I was president. But we moved in a hurry and we made it possible for them to be effective. That’s what the U.S. and NATO can do if we can get more Africans. Then if there aren’t enough African troops, I believe the United Nations should simply tell the Sudanese that, look, you know, you go implement your peace process; we are going to save these peoples lives, we will send some other Muslims in. For example, when we were in Haiti in the – in my first term, I wanted to get the American numbers down in a hurry so the Haitians wouldn’t think that America was trying to invade or take over or colonize the country. We wound up with over two dozen countries with troops there and one of the most valuable contingents came from Bangladesh. They actually were quite serviceable in that role. They did a nice job. It was a good training exercise for them and they needed the funds to help pay for their military.

So I think that my own view is if we can get a clear UN mandate, then we say to the African Union, look, it will probably take 40,000 troops; this is a big area. If we had 40,000 troops we could probably protect all the civilian lives, get all the supplies in, do all the stuff we are supposed to do. We will get – we, NATO – the U.S. and NATO will give logistical support for that many. If we can’t get that many, then we need to go back to all the parties and say look we are trying to find compatible people, but the most important thing is to get enough bodies on the ground with guns in their hand to keep people alive. That’s – that’s practically how I think this might be achieved.

In fairness, the Bush Administration, I think has really tried to do more and they are quite circumscribed in how many soldiers they can send because whether you agree with it or not, we do have 140,000-plus soldiers in Iraq and we have got 20,000 in Afghanistan and we’ve got some we can hardly take out of Korea right now given the circumstances and we have overstretched the Guard and the reserves. So the president has been, I think, you know, quite forthright on this given the restrictions on his own resources, but that’s my idea about how to break this logjam. And I think the last – the North-South peace thing should have the Sudanese government, (a), in a pretty good humor and, (b), very reluctant to shatter the air of good feelings by enraging the world community.

So now is the time to go back to the UN, broaden the mandate, tell the Africans we need more people, support them with the logistics if they can get it and if they can’t, look for some place like Bangladesh to make up the difference. That’s what I would like to see happen.

MR. PODESTA: Thank you. (Applause.) The next question is from Andrea Dinneen from Rice University – I know there’s a big crowd from Rice University here – who has a question about the internet and public debate.

Q: With the advent of the internet, many political debates now take place in the blogosphere. Do you think there’s any danger in dialogues that go on without the restraints of face-to-face interaction?

MR. PODESTA: Just to repeat the question –

PRES. CLINTON: The danger in dialogues that go on –

MR. PODESTA: – dialogues that go on without face-to-face interaction.

PRES. CLINTON: I don’t know about danger. I think that they shouldn’t wholly substitute for them. Of course, it won’t be long before all of your internet transactions would be face-to-face. You won’t be personally facing each other, but my own view of this is that this whole thing has been on balance a huge net plus that people have found – you know, I know there are a lot of crazy things in the internet. It bothers me you can figure out how to make bombs on the internet; a lot of things on the internet. It bothers me that there’s a lot of abusive sites, but on balance I think it’s a big net plus for global communications and for the empowerment of ordinary people and for the ability of like-minded people to get together.

I think the danger is not so much the absence of face-to-face communication, although I do think you should also have more face-to-face meetings. I think that the internet should never substitute entirely for people actually going and seeing other live human beings. I don’t want to see you all locked in a psychological closet for the rest of your lives, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think the danger is more significant.

Every time you make markets, whatever they are, smaller and smaller and smaller, it’s like – this is something I’m really sympathetic with, by the way, with our friends in television back there. When I was your age, we still just had three networks and everybody watched the evening news and when the Vietnam War was going on, ABC, CBS, and NBC could afford to send people my age with 40 years of experience to Vietnam to get around and cover things and talk about things. And, you know, all the big newspapers and television channels that had to sort of contract their foreign coverage and they’re under enormous competitive pressures. But also, the cable channels, in order to market to the slice that will guarantee them a profit, are basically pushed toward taking a given point of view so that the more you miniaturize any communications network, the more likely you are to filter out people who disagree with you and that’s the only danger I think.

It’s not that it is not face-to-face; it’s that I think that the internet is good, I think the blog sites are good, but I think all of us – if you want to stand against the far right – keep in mind, they believe they have that truth and they believe they can turn that truth into a political program. If they can convince the majority of people that’s true, we can’t win because we believe the essence of democracy is embodied in the ideas of the framers, right? Why were the states supposed to be the laboratories of democracy? Because nobody had the truth. We need to test and see what works and go on the evidence and go on to something else. My view is the danger is not non-face-to-face. The danger is shutting off all contact with people that disagree with you. You shouldn’t do that. You should always balance your contacts between your home-based sites and engaging in people who disagree or don’t know whether they agree with you. (Applause.)

MR. PODESTA: Senator David Pryor would not forgive me if we didn’t have one question from the University of Arkansas, so Chad Golsten (ph) is here and has a question.

Q: I come from National Arkansas, 30 minutes from your birthplace, but my question is, what do you suggest to those of us who want to be vocally progressive in places that are majority conservative?

MR. PODESTA: Majority conservative.

PRES. CLINTON: Well you know, keep in mind, when I went home to Arkansas after I graduated from Law School in 1973, I ran for Congress in ‘74 in a congressional district where Richard Nixon beat George McGovern, 74 to 26, against an incumbent congressman that had an 85 percent approval rating and I got over 48 percent of the vote. I say that – and it was in the Watergate, in the aftermath of Watergate. It was ‘74.

The point I’m trying to make is I would say two things; number one is, things change. Things change. The Intermountain West when I was born was the reason Harry Truman got reelected in 1948. He carried Arizona and countries up north because they believed in the federal government because they brought dams and power and opportunity. Then people turned against the Democrats because we believed in the environment and careful management of our natural resources and they thought we were meddling with their lives too much. Things changed. That’s the first thing I’d say.

Second thing I would say is, look at Barack Obama. Look at Barack – (applause). Now, Illinois – Illinois, it’s true, has become a solidly Democratic state. I carried it big. I think that – and one of the reasons I carried it big is Hillary was from there. We always had an unusual number of contacts there, but it’s different. It’s fundamentally changed now.

But Southern Illinois is south of Richmond. A lot of people don’t know that. Go look at your map, it’s south of Richmond. I got 70 percent of the vote in Southern Illinois in the Democratic primary in 1992 and carried it heavily in ‘92 and ‘96 and Barack carried it by more than I did when he ran for Senator.

What did he do? He was himself. But he was himself with people who would listen to him. You know, the great thing about people in small towns and rural areas is that they like it when you show up and they’re proud of being fair-minded. I mean, look at Nashville ; you know, this is where he is from. It was actually – they had a very conservative newspaper editor there when I was running for governor all the time who often disagreed with me, but I just made up my mind I was going to be friendly with him. And I had a lot of friends in that town even though it was one of the most conservative counties in the southwest part of the state. And I nearly always won there because I just kept working at it.

I mean, my advice to you is to work at it. This ain’t supposed to be easy and you have to work at it. I promise you our adversaries work at it. They work at grassroots politics. You know, if you look at – if you listen to the way Karl Rove talks about politics and you watch the way they’ve organized President Bush’s visits, he will go to a place – like if he came to Westchester County, where I live now in New York, and gave a speech today – let’s say he gave a speech to 1,200 people – the press might say and the Democrats might say, well, unlike Bill Clinton he didn’t get out and shake hands with everybody in town. No, he didn’t, but on the front row they’d have the five most important Republican precinct workers in that county and he would meet them and thank them for the work that they did.

So my point is, I would say it doesn’t matter where you live. If you live in Salt Lake City or Boise there are some Democrats and there are some people who will listen to you. This is work and I believe you’ve got to go back to grassroots work and relate to people individually. That’s what Obama did in Southern Illinois and that will work everywhere. It will work, but it’s not easy. You got to be able to work at it. This is not something for the fainthearted or people who like to take every night off. You’ve got to hammer it if you want to win. I mean, I – (applause).

John will tell you, I used to laugh when people – like I won elections because, you know, I was like Michael Jordan and had a four-foot vertical jump in politics or something like that. I actually worked harder than nearly anybody I ever met in this business, and it actually does make a difference. There’s a strong correlation between how hard you work and what results you get, assuming you’re working smart. So you should spent lots of time with people. Most people are really good people and you can find a way to connect to them.

MR. PODESTA: Those of us who are in the audience, I see Carol Browner, our EPA director; Dee Dee Myers; and others who dragged our rear ends behind the president can testify that he worked harder than just about anybody in politics.

I also – I actually prepared – worked on the debate prep team in 1992 and 1996 and Kayla Conklin from Temple University has one of those questions that we always feared as we were getting ready for debates, so Kayla? (Laughter.)

PRES. CLINTON: I’m not in. I don’t have to answer those anymore. Go ahead.

Q: I’m really not sure why it’s so scary, but I was just wondering in the wake of Hotel Rwanda, what is your favorite political movie?

PRES. CLINTON: Well I liked – that’s a good movie, and Don Cheadle did a great job. He is a friend of mine and I was proud of what he did. That one’s hard for me to watch, as you might imagine, but I think it’s a really good movie. I think that Black Hawk Down is a good movie, but the one thing that both the movie and the book didn’t do is explain how we came to be where we were on that fateful day. And if they had, America would look much better because what led the Black Hawk Down was that Mohammed Aidid, the Muslim warlord who controlled about three quarters of Mogadishu, had murdered 22 of our fellow UN peacekeepers. They were all Pakistani Muslims. So the UN came to us and said, look, we can’t have people murdering UN peacekeepers that weren’t trying to hurt anybody and only the U.S. has the capacity to arrest them.

And I wrote in my book how it went awry, and you can read it if you want, but the point I am trying to make is that a lot of these political movies I think perform a very good function. The thing I thought was interesting about Fahrenheit 9/11, which got a lot of press and probably would have been more helpful to the Democrats if it had come out six months later than it did because there was – since a lot of it was in the nature of personal ridicule of the president, there was bound to be a reaction on the part of the Republicans that allowed a diversion away from the factual assertions that were made in the movie.

But there was another documentary movie called The Real Facts About Iraq, or whatever was it, that was nowhere near as commercially successful, but was much more straightforward that I thought it was – would have been better had it had a big audience.

I basically believe that political movies should attempt to really get the facts straight and should minimize the amount of personal attacks or demeaning personal stuff because if it’s a story – like, you don’t have to say a bad word about me to know that America should have tried to save more lives in Rwanda. All you got to do is tell the story about what happened to those people. And that’s the same thing that’s true in all these political things, so I personally – it’s fun for us to see things demeaning the other side if we are mad at them just like the Republicans love it. You know, there’s – some of it, Richard Cohen said the other day there was nothing that you could say about Bill or Hillary Clinton that some right-winger wouldn’t love. You know, you could accuse him of mass murder and somebody would go buy the book thinking it must the Gospel truth, but that’s not very effective. The most effective political movies are – tell a human story. That’s what was great about Hotel Rwanda and what I thought was good about Black Hawk Down.

MR. PODESTA: Now, when I saw that question about political movie, I was thinking about campaigns and I – of The War Room.

PRES. CLINTON: What did you think I would say? Mr. Smith Goes to Washington right? (Laughter.)

MR. PODESTA: How about The Candidate?

PRES. CLINTON: I’ll tell you a great old political movie I urge you to look at sometime: Advice and Consent. It’s just come out on VCR. (Laughter.) It’s one – it’s really – it’s about the Senate confirmation –

MR. PODESTA: DVD, Mr. President.

PRES. CLINTON: DVD, I mean. (Laughter.) I’m tired; DVD. (Applause.) Actually, Advice and Consent is about the confirmation of a prospective secretary of state and it was made about – over 40 years ago. It’s fascinating and it deals with a lot of the cross-currents that we are dealing with today, so I recommend you read it – you look at it. It’s one of the best political movies ever made.

MR. PODESTA: We are going to give the last question to Adam Maldonado from Whitman College.

PRES. CLINTON: Why are we in the dark? Am I being punished for my techno mistake? Lights.

Q: After the returning from your recent travels with former President Bush, what in your opinion are both the largest partisan and non-partisan impediments and challenges for the United States in appropriating adequate foreign assistance to the impoverished nations that need it most? And, additionally, Mr. President, if you would feel comfortable, what if any is the significance of the band on your right arm?

PRES. CLINTON: Oh this?

Q: Yes.

PRES. CLINTON: I feel very comfortable talking about that.

Q: Thank you.

PRES. CLINTON: First of all, let’s look at the good news on this aid business. Starting in sort of maybe late 1999, a significant slice of the Christian evangelical community got interested in international assistance and changed the attitude of the Republicans. A lot of – a critical mass of Republicans in Congress. Dee Dee and John can tell you that for most of the time I was president, we had to fight to keep them from cutting foreign aid. And it was all we could do – even when we had a surplus they wanted to cut foreign aid.

But once the Christian evangelic community decided they had a different view, they turned a lot of Republican congressmen and it’s made a huge difference. I remember the only time Pat Robertson came to the White House when I was president – and he talked about it on television the other night. It tickled me; I was pleased – was when we had a big meeting on the Millennium debt relief initiative where we forgave the debt – we made 34 of the poorest countries in the world eligible for debt relief. I think 28 have now qualified. It’s worth billions of dollars, probably more money than the debt relief initiative they’re talking about now. The United Sates also forgave all the bilateral debt relief we had outstanding, and in ‘99 and 2000 we did this.

And ever since then, the Christian evangelical community has really been coming along. Then Bono turned Jesse Helms on aid – on this. And then the evangelicals got interested in AIDS as a mortal mission and that has made a big difference. So I think that that’s the good news.

The biggest impediments today in my opinion are budgetary ones. I mean, we’ve got a big deposit. And, also, the money is slow and flowing out to the affected people because of the philosophical difference that we have with the Republicans. As I said, they basically favor unilateral action whenever they can. They think they get better results and have more control over it. We favor basically multilateral or cooperative action because we think money goes further if we’re all working together.

So in case of the millennium development initiative, for example, President Bush offered a lot of aid to poor countries, but I think only four have qualified and only one has gotten the money so far and this is – that’s been after almost three years because you had to take up a – set up a whole new bureaucracy and set up standards and begin to implement the program. I think that’s a big impediment. I respect what the president wants to do. He wants to reward good governance and observation of human rights and he is afraid if we put our money into an international pipeline that might not happen, but I think we’ve not gotten as much as we could have.

The same thing is true on AIDS, where we provide about a third of the money to the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria, but we are spending most of our AIDS money unilaterally. And I understand less about why we wanted to do that because I think the global fund is doing a really good job. And I like Mr. Tobias, the man who is running the AIDS program. I think they’re really sincere about it and they don’t believe that I’m right in doing a lot of what I do with generic AIDS medicine. But my little foundation is now giving medicine to more people directly than the American program is: 110,000 people with almost, you know, a pittance of the money because we are using generic medicine at $140 a person a year, the cheapest price in the world, and we are giving testing at $40 a person a year as compared with $400, which we pay in America.

So that’s where I think the impediments are, but I give the president credit: he has been willing to ask for money and he has been willing to go further with Tony Blair and the others at the G-8 meeting. I think it would be more effective if we would have a more responsible fiscal situation and if we were willing to work harder with more people.

This bracelet was given to me in Colombia on June the 27 th, 2002 and in their culture you’re supposed to wear it till it wears off. It was given to me by a group of children called the Children of Vallenato. They sing and dance. They’re folk singers and dancers against the narco-traffickers and their guerilla supporters. I saw them in Columbia in 2000 when we had a big, bipartisan initiative called Plan Columbia, which is working, by the way. In Columbia since 2000, coca plantings are down a third; opium plantings down two thirds; violence, murder and kidnapping are down; and 10,000 people have left either the paramilitaries or the guerillas and returned to normal society. They’re doing a really good job.

But these kids began the symbol of that. In 2000, they came to the White House with the cultural minister of Columbia, known only by her first name Consuelo. She was a great woman about a couple of years younger than me; a really, beautiful lovely woman and these – the guerillas and the narco-traffickers hated these children because they made them look like just what they were. And they couldn’t very well kill the kids, so they murdered Consuelo. And I spoke to her funeral by satellite because I couldn’t go down there. They filled the Bogota soccer stadium. They had like 100,000 people come out for the funeral.

So when they asked me to come back in 2002, I said, “I’ll come, but I want those children there.” I got off the plane at 9:30 at night. They gave me this bracelet and introduced me to the new cultural minister, the niece of the murdered woman. They are very brave, the Colombians. I was just there, Consuelo’s husband has become a prosecutor. Her niece is still living and healthy and is the cultural minister and the kids have just put out their latest CD dedicated to their godfather: me. So that’s why I wear this. (Applause.)

Q: Thank you.

MR. PODESTA: Thank you. I want to thank you, Mr. President, not just for being with us today, but for everything you’re doing around the world. That was just – you just did a tour of the world and it’s amazing how much you continue to do for all the people of the world. Thank you.

PRES. CLINTON: Thank you all. Bless you. (Applause.)

(END)