A Discussion with President Bill Clinton

On Thursday, March 1, former President Bill Clinton stopped by the University of Miami's Coral Gables campus to speak to members of the university community. As it was a closed event, only university staff, faculty, students and alumni were provided with tickets to attend. Perhaps the most visible person in attendance, besides Mr. Clinton himself of course, and UM President Donna Shalala was Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Flashbulbs illuminated the Bank United Center upon his entrance and didn't stop until 10 minutes after the President began his speech.

Due to time constraints, President Clinton announced gave what he said was an abbreviated version of his normal speech. He began by saying, "I believe every responsible citizen must be able to ask and answer five simple questions." They are as follows:

1. What is the fundamental character of the 21st century?
Clinton: Interdependence

2. Is it a good or a bad thing?
Clinton*: Both. The ways that it is good are self-evident. Just look at this crowd here. The UM student body is more diverse that it was 30 years ago. The result of that diversity is a better audience to speak to. There are three reasons why it's bad: a) it's unequal (half the world is poor, 1 billion people have no clean water etc.), b) it's unstable (we're vulnerable to disease, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism etc), c) current world is unsustainable (with the way our climate is changing, people are depleting our natural resources)

3. How should we change it?
Clinton*: Work from interdependence to integrated community on the local, national and international scales. Share the opportunities and responsibilities of keeping our world alive and thriving. We should embrace the simple idea that the differences between us are interesting, but our shared humanity matters more.

4. How do we do that?
Clinton*: We need a new security policy, to push diplomacy ("It's not possible to jail, kill or occupy all of our adversaries"), stress cooperation and improve at home (policies, standards etc).

5. Who's supposed to do all this?
Clinton*: "We ALL have to do something." Government is important, but we need more aggressive policies. Policies like more efficient energy sources so we can reduce the damage that global warming is doing to our planet.

Clinton then continued to speak for 15 minutes on the change his life has taken since leaving the White House (going from politician to private citizen), his personal views on what he would do to if he were still president and his current public policy endeavors.

Following his speech, there was a short question and answer session facilitated by President Shalala. Questions were submitted by students and selected prior to the event.

Overall, I thought it was a great experience to hear such a great president speak about the state of the world today, after he's left office. However, his speech was riding on the coattails of Al Gore and unfortunately seemed to fall a little flat in comparison. Nonetheless, he is still President Bill Clinton, and I personally hope not the last Clinton we will see in the White House.

*Denotes paraphrasing of Clinton’s words.