Bill Clinton: Hillary wants me to restore image of US
:cow:
Oliver Burkeman
Friday October 5, 2007
The Guardian
If Hillary Clinton wins the US presidency, Bill Clinton will be given the job of repairing America's damaged international reputation, the former president tells the Guardian in an interview today.
Mr Clinton, 61, reveals that his wife has said she would ask him to "go out and immediately restore America's standing, go out and tell people America was open for business and cooperation again" after eight years marked by unilateralist policies that have "enrage[d] the world".
For the first time in his political life, Mr Clinton says, "ordinary US voters in the heartlands are concerned about who would be most likely to restore America's standing in the world" in the wake of the Iraq war, lack of action on climate change and other policies.
"The average American knows instinctively that we have almost no problems in the world that we can solve all by ourselves," he says. "And that, I think, is helping her candidacy, because people believe - I think rightly - that if she were elected she would quickly move to restore our standing in the world, and tell people there may be a few occasions when we have to do something on our own, but our strong preference is going to be to be cooperative."
The collective effect of American unilateralism has been "to enrage the world at the very moment when we had more support than we've had in recent memory, because of 9/11", Mr Clinton says.
The former president was visiting London this week to host a fundraising dinner for his wife's campaign, and to promote his new book, Giving, which urges people to give time and money to good causes regardless of their age or wealth.
Inspired by Nelson Mandela, Mr Clinton has played a key role in tapping new wealth from the IT sector as a source of philanthropic funds. At last week's Clinton Global Initiative event in New York, he said, individuals, corporations and world leaders pledged at least $10bn (£4.9bn), and possibly twice that.
Mr Clinton argues that American voters are tiring of a politics and media that have been under the sway of "the most ideological, rightwing element of the Republican party", leading to a national climate in which "three-dimensional reality" has been turned into "two-dimensional cartoons, and then [the rightwing media] try to get people to divide up on the basis of whether you like the cartoon or not ... I want the American people to stop rewarding the ideological wing of the Republican party, so we can have a centre-left party and a centre-right party and they can have real debates about real things."
read the rest at...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2184177,00.html
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."
Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
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