Clinton helps recap era at library's 10th

Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, Erskine Bowles (left), and Clinton’s former economic council director, Gene Sperling, recount some of their federal budget battles during a panel discussion Friday at the Clinton Presidential Center.
Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, Erskine Bowles (left), and Clinton’s former economic council director, Gene Sperling, recount some of their federal budget battles during a panel discussion Friday at the Clinton Presidential Center.

Most class reunions aren't punctuated with idle chatter about Yasser Arafat, Bosnia or the earned income tax credit.

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Former President Bill Clinton acknowledges a fan holding a “Clinton for Governor” bag as he walks to the podium during Friday’s 10th anniversary celebration of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.

Then again, most classes didn't have a commander in chief as class president.

The 10th anniversary of the Clinton Presidential Center's opening Friday -- a symposium and retrospective on the Arkansas-born president's administration -- was as much an informative series of musings on domestic and foreign policies of the Clinton era as it was a get-together for former staff members and political strategists.

The event was held at the presidential center's Great Hall.

Academics and former Cabinet members, chiefs of staff and national security advisers took turns sharing their experiences and perspectives of Clinton's eight years in the White House.

But Clinton, true to form, had the final word at the event and said he saw it not only as a chance to look at what he and his allies had accomplished but also how they accomplished it.

"This day should convince all of you that policymaking and policy implementing are really important," he said. "Whether people agree with what we did or not -- what you decide to do and whether you can do it -- how you do it is really important. It matters to the country. It matters to people in their daily lives. And the details matter."

The event also coincided with the public release of oral histories told by key players in Clinton's campaigns and administration, hundreds of hours of interviews gathered by the University of Virginia's Miller Center, which has been assembling oral histories for every presidential administration since Gerald Ford.

Friday's speakers and the event's eclectic audience shared laughs over politics and punch lines involving Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and even Al Gore, who Clinton insisted was "much funnier than he got credit for."

But the event's three dialogues, which ranged from Clinton's attempts at health care reform to his efforts to support democracies worldwide, came back to Clinton's governing principles and his painstaking work to craft policies that would have impact beyond mere talking points.

Dedication to pragmatic policy is far more important to the public than political dogma, Clinton said.

He pointed to his home state's so-called private option, which uses federal Medicaid dollars to buy private health insurance for poor Arkansans, as evidence of that. Republican legislative leaders worked with Democrats to create the private option and expand eligibility for Medicaid, a goal of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

"We're finally number one in something. We've seen the biggest drop in people without health insurance in America. Now, I don't know if the thing will be continued or not, but it should be," the former president said.

"If you lived in a fact-based world, we'd keep it," Clinton said, referring to the Nov. 4 elections that saw several avowed foes of the private option elected to the state Legislature. "Our neighbors took the Tea Party position, wouldn't touch it. [Their rates] will go up 18 percent in Louisiana and 14 percent in Texas, and go down 2 percent in Arkansas ... down because we don't have uncompensated care.

"Why am I telling you this? Because these details are important. It matters that people know what is in policy and why it succeeds or fails."

Foreign policy

A panel moderated by The Atlantic editor James Bennet included former national security adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger, national security experts Mara Rudman and Nancy Soderberg, Washington and Lee University professor Robert Strong and Arkansas native and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark.

The speakers touched on Clinton's efforts to establish peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East as well as support a democratic Haiti, but ended up focusing on the U.S.-led effort to end the Bosnian conflict and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

At a time when the Soviet Union no longer loomed as the nation's great enemy, the public wanted to withdraw and focus on issues at home, the panelists said. Foreign intervention in nations no one could pronounce, let alone point to on a map, was driven by the need to not only do the right thing, but to help shape the post-Soviet world and improve the nation's standing as the true world leader, they said.

"It was an enormous gamble," Berger said. "But we could not allow ethnic cleansing in Europe at the end of the 20th century."

Soderberg said the Clinton administration's foreign policy legitimized the U.S. in the world's eyes and put it on "the right side" of history.

Domestic policy

In a panel moderated by Susan Page, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for USA Today, Clinton's former Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman, former Clinton adviser Bruce Reed and Bowdoin College professor Andrew Rudalevige traversed eight years of accomplishments, including the success of the earned income tax credit, the development of charter schools, and the Family Medical Leave Act, Clinton's first signed law.

After the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton always faced a hostile Republican Congress, Reed pointed out, but he was able to move forward on social programs through a combination of pragmatism and intimacy with lawmakers that many of the panelists thought was missing from current lawmaking in Washington.

"[Clinton's] goal was not to crush the opponent," Reed said. "The goal was to take the good ideas [Republicans] had, put it in his program, and then dare them not to vote for it."

Fiscal policy

In the day's final talk, award-winning Washington Post editorialist Jonathan Capehart covered budget balancing and economic growth -- described as the longest peacetime economic boom in U.S. history -- with architects of the programs: former National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling and former Chief of Staff and North Carolina businessman Erskine Bowles.

Professor Brendan Doherty of the U.S. Naval Academy also weighed in.

Bowles and Sperling spent much of the time talking about the budget showdowns that led to two government shutdowns.

"Congress saw that this president had a backbone, he wouldn't cave, he'd stand on his principles," Bowles said. "It made everything we did afterward that much easier."

In an hour-long speech, Clinton said that presidents get too much of the credit in history while team members like Bowles, Reed and others receive too little.

Clinton said his administration left the American people "better off."

"For all of you who had anything to do with that, I am grateful," he said.

The celebration of the center's 10 years, as well as the work of the nonprofit William J. Clinton Foundation, will continue today, culminating with a free concert at the center's amphitheater featuring Nick Jonas, Amos Lee and Kool & the Gang.

The final event will fall Monday for a group discussion of the economic and social impact of the Clinton Presidential Center on central Arkansas.

Metro on 11/15/2014

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