Peter Yang

Twenty years ago this month, on the early afternoon of February 18, 1992, in a lousy room with two double beds at the Days Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire — primary day — Bill Clinton's senior campaign staff frantically worked on two speeches, one of which the candidate would deliver that night after the day's results were known. Two weeks before, amid a firestorm of rumor and scandal, Clinton, who had the best organization and had been the front-runner, had seen his numbers collapse. Now he was mired down with the rest of the pack — Tom Harkin and

Bob Kerrey and Jerry Brown — while native-son Paul Tsongas, from neighboring Massachusetts, held a commanding lead. Not giving up, Clinton had scratched and clawed and campaigned around the clock, in bowling alleys and bait shops and dive bars, declaring to the people of New Hampshire that he would be with them until "the last dog dies." And so on the afternoon of primary day, the governor's staff holed up and wrote one set of remarks for a strong second-place finish, which would mean not only that Clinton had survived but that he'd effectively won. The second speech was to be delivered if Clinton faded to a distant second, or worse. This speech would likely have marked the end of Clinton's campaign that year, and maybe the end of his political career. The room was extraordinarily tense. Senior advisor Paul Begala manned the keyboard and did the writing. George Stephanopoulos hovered over him, looking at the screen. Mandy Grunwald sat on the double bed across the room. Bob Boorstin stood at the window. Every few minutes, James Carville, too restless to be contained by any room, would burst through the door, speak in tongues for exactly one minute, and slam the door on his way out.

Just then, the first exit-poll numbers began to come in, and it became clear that Clinton's desperate bid to survive had worked. Suddenly energized, Begala began to type furiously. "The guy's been shit on and shot at more than anybody in American presidential politics, and he's survived!" he said. "He's the Comeback Kid!"

This, of course, all happened before a single moment of the Clinton presidency transpired, one of the most rancorous and partisan periods in American history, culminating in a presidential impeachment that was seen as so political as to be illegitimate, and that has all but been forgotten.

And so twenty years after Bill Clinton walked onto the world stage, during this new period of astoundingly rancorous partisanship, it might amuse him that he himself has become one of the few things that Americans can agree on. Comeback Kid indeed.

ESQUIRE: Mr. President, as we're going into an election year that will likely scorch the earth, we want to talk with you about the notion of American consensus for the common good and why that is in so much trouble right now, and we want to find consensus on some things. As impossible as it might have seemed twenty years ago, there is now no figure of greater consensus in America than you. How did that happen? What is different between now and then? Why does the politics seem so much more caustic now than even then?

CLINTON: Well, it is more caustic now, but don't forget, when I was there, there were radio talk shows accusing me of murder, killing guys on train tracks in Arkansas, and of running drugs in western Arkansas, that kind of stuff.

First of all, I think the obvious answer is that I'm not running for anything anymore, and when you get out of the conflict, there is no particular advantage to somebody continuing to tear you down. And I think the second thing is the work I have done since I left office. It is seen as both conventionally progressive — the kind of stuff a Democrat would do in America and around the world — but it focuses on what works, and I've been able to generate support from liberals and conservatives across the board. One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well. It is extremely personal now, and you see in these primaries that the more people agree with each other on the issues, the more desperate they are to make the clear distinctions necessary to win, so the deeper the knife goes in.

And the same thing happens in the general election. I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties. He got out, ran for the Senate against Ernest Hollings, lost. Then he won his House seat back. And he had an accident. Fell in his bathroom or something. It was awful. During his recovery, he had a long time to think, and he told me, "I had an epiphany." He said, "I realized I didn't have to hate the Democrats who disagree with me." And a lot of Democrats had been nice to him, the people in Congress, when he was recovering. And he also was persuaded — as was Lindsey Graham, by John McCain — that global warming was real and a problem, so he set about trying to find a conservative solution to it that is good for the market and consistent with conservative principles. He also acknowledged that President Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. He's a Christian, not a Muslim. I like him, he said, but I disagree with him on everything. And for those things, Bob Inglis, he lost his primary in 2010. A guy that had a 100 percent conservative rating.

So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president." And he said, "That's wrong." And he said, "I'm sorry." And he now meets with a group in South Carolina with a woman he once defeated, Liz Patterson. Very commendable thing.

I'm saying that there's plenty of room here for debate, but over the last thirty years or so, we have seen the rise of these real hardcore far-right groups that come to define conservatism. I remember them being influential in elections in Arkansas starting in the mid-seventies.

I also think that the diffusion of the media has complicated things. For example, I was just watching — I don't know if you heard what I said in the other room — I was just watching MSNBC, and they had a woman that used to work for me and a couple of other people on there, and they were talking about the Republican primary. And I was laughing. I said, "Boy, it really has become our version of Fox." And I say that because think of the economics of running cable channels. Suppose you and I bought a cable channel, and he [pointing] bought another. You know that to make a living out of it, you've got to get about eight hundred thousand viewers for all your major programs. So you can get eight hundred thousand, and you won't be as wealthy as Fox, but you'll do okay. And now if you get a slice that's that small and still viable — and you know it's not like when we just had NBC, CBS, and ABC. That's all there was. Everybody had enough market share that they knew would guarantee some comfortable level of profit. And yet there was enough competition that everybody could keep each other honest, and when the Vietnam War came along, they could send fifty-five-year-old reporters to Vietnam for extended stays. They could afford to have correspondents in Europe to report. Correspondents in Asia. All that's changed now. And so the good news is you can get a lot of information off the Internet for free and in a hurry. But I think the breaking up of the media, which is otherwise kind of healthy, has contributed to less actual reporting and a louder, more contentious, more divisive public discourse, highlighting conflict, sometimes falsely.

ESQUIRE: What forces created such a narrow field of Republican contenders for the presidency in this election cycle?

CLINTON: Well, there are all kinds of reasons why someone like Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbour or Chris Christie wind up not being candidates. I think governors in general — maybe not some of the new Republican crop that got in trouble quickly, but that generally, the conservative Republican governors tend to be more oriented toward trying to work with Democrats and getting things done. But it's been building up since the mid-seventies — this rage against the government — and frankly, on at least two occasions they were richly rewarded for the just-say-no thing. They won the Congress in 1994 and 2010 by just being against everything and saying the sky was gonna fall. And since the people didn't feel better by the time of the election, it worked. One of the reasons people stay with a strategy like that is it works. And then when it seems not to be working, they tend to change.

Of course, public opinion has a lot to do with this. That means people should really take care when they vote, and pay more attention to what people say they're going to do — instead of just how they feel about how things are going.

With someone like Newt Gingrich, it's a different kettle of fish. Because as a private citizen he was for certain important health-care reforms and believed in climate change and believed there had to be a strong reaction to it. And now he's just like Romney. Neither one of them can say what they believe to be true and get nominated. Romney's still trying to figure out what he did as governor of Massachusetts and still appeal to this driving vituperative energy.

ESQUIRE: It's remarkable that there would have been a time in living memory when someone like Jon Huntsman would have been regarded as the most conservative candidate in the field. Maybe even unacceptably conservative. But because of his insistence on having a grown-up discourse, he's somehow seen as a moderate.

CLINTON: Huntsman's economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners'. But he also doesn't make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America's national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.

But all of a sudden that's disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we're, you know, we're living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.

(This article is an edited version of interviews with President Clinton that took place on November 30 and December 16, 2011.)

Peter Yang

ESQUIRE: Who do you think the next president will be?

CLINTON: I think Barack Obama will be the next president. I think he will win. Because I think that whatever feelings the American people have about their own conditions and however much they may wish he had moved more quickly, I think that they will conclude that it takes a long time to get out of the kind of economic distress we were in and that his direction and policies are more likely to move us out of that than if they give the White House and the Congress to a party that will give them more of what they just had.

I think that the rapid decrease in popularity of the Republican governors in places like Florida and Ohio and Wisconsin will help him.

It shows you how inexact the voting process is, and how people vote for candidates based on some fleeting rhetorical impression or their sense of the connection between that election and their own circumstances, rather than listening to what candidates actually say they intend to do. Because every one of those governors is just doing what they said they were gonna do.

But I think that the president will win. He'll be able to talk about the difference in the auto industry between when he took office and the way it is now. I think he'll be able to talk about much more progress in certain sectors of the economy, and he's going to have a very strong national-security record to run on, so he won't be vulnerable there. In fact, the Republican may be more vulnerable than he is there. So even though the conditions of the country are difficult, I expect him to win. And I also think, based on what happened in 2008, that once he gets an opponent in the general election, I think except for Fox and the conservative outlets, the media will tilt back toward him. The coverage won't be as anodyne and evenhanded as it has been.

ESQUIRE: You stress that the antigovernment movement has been a long march. Are we now living through the inevitable conclusion of that long march? Was it headed this way all along, or was there a moment when the Republicans could have turned away from the anti-intellectual, antiscience, no-tax-increases-of-any-kind kind of thing? Was there a turning point where they could have said, We can be antigovernment to an extent, but we're not going to go off the cliff?

CLINTON: They could have done it if they hadn't turned on the first President Bush. Because Reagan, you know, since he enacted that massive tax cut in '81, they cut him some slack when he clawed back by 40 percent of it and signed the Social Security Commission's recommendation. And they cut him some slack because it was working — because it was the first time we'd ever run permanent deficits and that ignited a long stimulus. But if they'd stayed with President Bush in '92, they were in a place where they would always be to the right of the Democrats, but they were still basically a science-based, reality-based party. President Bush had signed some things — the Clean Air Act — which were very, very good. And the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But he was conservative. He vetoed the Brady Bill — he gave in to the NRA — and he vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act. But at least we were all sort of in a range of debate.

And then they could have turned back to reality when President Bush won that narrow and hotly contested election. Second President Bush. But once they decided to have the big tax cut, fight the two wars, pass the senior drug benefit, do the PEPFAR [President Bush's $15 billion AIDS-relief package], and once Tom DeLay said that in wartime there's nothing more important than cutting taxes, then it was just a matter of time that their most extreme elements were going to prevail, because the combination of low job growth, increasing concentration of wealth, increasing investment flows having nothing to do with creating jobs, more and more leverage, even if the financial crisis had not started in the United States, it almost certainly would have spread here.

And you can see this in Europe, too. While you would think that financial and economic distress would help the party of activist government, in fact, because it increases insecurity so much, it normally helps the Right. And this next election will be a pivotal one, simply because we'll have to decide whether we want more cooperation and both successful economy and an active government, or whether we're gonna continue to just say that middle-class people never get a raise because the government's too big. If we go down that road, it will reinforce those trends.

Obviously I'm trying to counter that. You know, I liked working with Republicans. We had five pretty good years after we had that bad year in '95 that culminated in two government shutdowns. But then they really decided that they liked being in the majority for the first time in forty years, and they wanted to get some things done, and I agreed, to get things I wanted. It was all perfectly transparent. Everybody knew what they wanted and what I wanted. And then when I thought they were asking for too much, when they wanted to use welfare reform as an excuse to get rid of Medicaid and food stamps, I vetoed that a couple of times, and we wound up with a welfare-reform bill. That's the way the system's supposed to work. Those were the two great chances they had, I think, to become a more dynamic conservative party, instead of just the radical antigovernment party.

I think that you could get a consensus in America. You look at all these surveys. You could get 60 to 70 percent support for a sensible agenda. This consensus would leave out 20 to 25 percent of the electorate, but that 20 to 25 percent could be a majority of the Republican electorate. When you take out the Democrats and the independents, a lot of this battle is gonna be fought there.

ESQUIRE: So you are saying that an American consensus exists in America, but it can't manifest itself politically.

CLINTON: It either exists or it could be put together.

ESQUIRE: Is there anything unique about the Obama presidency, aside from his race, that explains the degree to which this notion of American consensus has suffered lately?

CLINTON: Well, the Democratic nominee was going to be elected president in 2008. Because the economy was already in bad shape. The recession had begun in 2007, and even before that we were generating no new jobs, pay was stagnant, poverty was increasing, health-care costs had doubled, and college costs had gone up 75 percent after inflation. Before the financial collapse. But on September 15, when Lehman Brothers failed, the race was over. The only presidential election in my lifetime I think that ended before the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was done.

But it also fundamentally changed the character of the challenges he would face. Keep in mind, the average recession is over in a year, and then it takes a while for people to feel it. So even when people start getting hired and activity starts, it takes time before your pay goes up, right? Before you feel secure, or you feel like you can go down to the local bank and buy that $100,000 piece of equipment to modernize your dry-cleaning operation. There's a lag. That's what happened to me in '94 — things were getting better, but people didn't feel it. I get it. But when that financial crash occurred, it changed the universe.

And when the president came in, he was looking at a financial collapse and a mortgage collapse. As Kenneth Rogoff points out in the great book he wrote, you can go back five hundred years, and all these financial crises take five to ten years to get over.

The recession didn't reach its lowest point until about July 1, '09. As Obama was passing his stimulus bill in February and talking about what it was going to do, the best consensus among private economists and the government people who keep the figures was that the economy was going to lose 3.8 percent, okay? Well, it turns out the economy collapsed 8.9 percent. So what the stimulus was projected to do it actually did, and did a little better than everybody thought it would, but it was on a lower base, so all it could do is put a floor under the recession and keep it from becoming a depression. But it couldn't lift us out of the hole.

And the American people by then were really worried that the deficit had doubled under President Bush, after we'd had four surpluses with my last four budgets. And they also were beginning to do what they should have done in growth periods — they were beginning to save. This is a personal virtue, but the lack of spending made it harder for us to claw up and out of the recession. And so President Obama has faced the starker version of what happened to me in the '94 elections, where things were getting better, but people didn't really feel it.

And it couldn't be all right. For five hundred years, there was no example of when it had been all right, but people really didn't understand that. Plus, Americans — not just starting thirty years ago but going back to the beginning, when we were rebelling against King George — we've always been of two minds about the government, which is why the framers wrote the Constitution the way they did. It was supposed to give us enough government to do whatever we needed to do, and that adjusts as economic and social systems changed over time, but keep us from having too much so as to choke us off in terms of either our liberties or economic freedom. So when you take this traditional skepticism that goes back to the beginning and you lay on the whole infrastructure of an antigovernment crowd for the last thirty years, they looked at the stimulus and the automobile restructuring, at the health-care bill (which is a big part of our economic recovery — we can't keep spending $850 billion more a year than we would if we had any other country's health-care system). And all these other things. So it felt like too much government. And the voters in the middle, the swing voters, what they thought they were doing in this last election is the same darn thing they thought they were doing in '94. They thought, Well, we've got a little bit too much government, so we'll put the Republicans in, they'll all have to work together, we'll get a little less, and maybe we'll get out of this better. And besides, we don't feel fixed.

There was no way people could feel fixed in 2010. So I wish now, and I'm not — I didn't see it, either — but I wish now that we had all known enough about this on September 16, 2008, when we still had a debate or two to go, and that the president could have said, "You know, I've just looked at this. This kind of thing is happening to us now, first we gotta keep everything from cratering, and that means we'll have to help some people who contributed to the problem. I hate that, but I can't let your financial system go down. I can't let it be so you can't use your credit card. I can't let — and then, at five hundred years every one of these things takes between five and ten years to get over. My goal is to beat that. I'm gonna try to get it done for you in less than five years. That's my goal, that oughta be America's goal, we oughta beat the odds, we oughta do something nobody has ever done before, but it won't be fixed in two years. It can't be."

Peter Yang

ESQUIRE: When we talk about American consensus, the one thing that mystifies is why we can't come to a consensus that we need to rebuild the national infrastructure. Maybe it's because a generation of people whose parents talked to them about the WPA is dying off, and we don't know what we're capable of. But for instance, Michael Dukakis and Tommy Thompson, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, supported a proposal for a high-speed inter-city rail linking the Midwest, beginning at Cincinnati in the east and going as far north as Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis. The economic activity it would create would be tremendous. Why can't we get a consensus for something like this? Where is the Apollo-program American drive?

CLINTON: I got a substantial amount of money to try to start developing rapid rail in '93, and as soon as we lost Congress, the Republicans got rid of it. But in the nineties at least they would support major highway funding and road repairs and bridge repairs, and continued funds to help the states modernize their internal infrastructure — the water systems, the sewer systems, and all that. The reason, I think, this is happening — I think that the House and Senate are two different things. But I think the House has all these people who think, That's fine, but we shouldn't put any tax money in — I mean, that's what I think. And the Senate, I think Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do it 'cause he's afraid it'll work.

ESQUIRE: Where's the demand from outside, though? Where are the people insisting, "Hey, my bridge is falling down, and 'We can't afford to fix it' is not a good enough answer for me. And if you can't come up with a better one, then you're back in the private sector"?

CLINTON: One of the things that I think should be done is the infrastructure bill that Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Kerry proposed, which sets up an infrastructure bank which would be seeded with U. S. taxpayers' money, but it would be open to investors. Like, you and I could buy a $1,000 infrastructure bond, or the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, Saudi sovereign wealth fund, anybody could invest in it, and the returns on infrastructure are significant enough that in an uncertain stock market, I think you could get a lot of private capital.

And then it would be really interesting, it'd be a great opportunity — all this dispute about the one tenth of 1 percent of America that Paul Krugman's always talking about. I believe that people of my income group should pay more, and I explained why, but that won't necessarily lift overall wage levels. To do that, you've gotta have more jobs, a tighter labor market, different job mix. This is one way that wealthy Americans could really contribute. They could put hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure bank, be a good investment for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, and they would directly contribute to revitalizing a big sector of middle-class wages in America and making our country more productive, so that we could create more opportunity. But I think that we could get a lot of grassroots support from, like, local chambers of commerce and other things if they understood exactly how this infrastructure bank would work. I hope that the president will make more of this, and I wouldn't be as sure as everyone is now that nothing will be done next year. If we get this done, then I think he ought to challenge them to make a deal on corporate taxes and establishing the infrastructure bank that can take private capital, and you can make some slice of that deal repatriating a bunch of that money that's overseas now at a lower tax rate, and put that money directly in the infrastructure bank. That's the federal government's contribution, and then open it up for other investment. And I think, you know, you might have $100 billion by the time you get done — that could put people to work right away.

ESQUIRE: But it doesn't seem like people in general think they can demand anything of government anymore. We're divided between people who don't think government can do anything and other people who think that we can't demand anything. Do you think the outside-the-government fervor of the Occupy movement and other similar things is a good spur to change that?

CLINTON: Yes. Potentially it is, and that's what I've been saying from the beginning. I've gotten some criticism on some of the more left-wing blogs about it, but the complaining about the abuses of the 1 percent or tenth of a percent of Americans who are in finance, who helped to cause this mess, that's been very useful, because I've been talking about income inequality in America for twenty years, and when I was president, people didn't pay much attention to it, probably because wages were going up. But I don't think I've given a single solitary speech since I left office that I hadn't talked about it. It's a problem around the world and within the United States. So these people have put that on the agenda.

But what I've been trying to get them to do is to unite behind just one or two or three simple things that they can be for, and then mobilize people who won't spend the night outside in November. And the infrastructure bank would be a very good thing to do, because it really would put people to work. If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that because of the home models that are out there now.

There are these two guys on Long Island who started a little home-repair deal. They got thirty-five employees now, and they're — they can go in, tell you how much they'll save you. There's an operation in Nebraska that's in and out in a day, and they're averaging more than 20 percent savings, and conservative Republican Nebraska is the only state in the country that has 100 percent publicly owned power. They're all owned by municipalities, so the cities will just, you know, add the bill, and so if we're all living there, we have three choices: We can just pay for the stuff right away and the bill goes down 20, 22 percent, or we can tell 'em, We're gonna pay it off as quick as we can, but we can't afford anything else, so you just take it out of our savings every month. That's normally a year and a half. Or, if you want to take three years, you can give some of your savings now and split it with them. And the municipalities do it. [New York governor] Andrew Cuomo just signed a bill that got no coverage, which will basically allow people to do the same thing on their Con Ed bill. It's called on-bill financing, so that you make a deal with the contractor and whoever's financing the contractor to pay off your retrofit only through your savings. They estimate that in New York alone, they can create ten to twelve thousand jobs immediately doing this. This is the kind of thing we can be doing all over America, at low tax-dollar investment, to put a lot of people to work right away.

One of the problems is that a lot of people in your profession, particularly people who have to do the daily news and cover the politics all the time, they're so sensitive about being branded too far to the left that everything's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and all the while, you know, these guys just keep moving farther to the right. But I still believe John Boehner has good sense, and he's got a pretty good feel for America, you know, all that time he spent in his daddy's bar, he's got a pretty good feel for where Joe Six-Pack is, and I think that is important.

I also think that having all these businesspeople in Alabama recoiling against the extreme immigration law, that's a very good thing.

One piece of this that I think we need to push harder, we the Democrats, because it's an open door for the Republicans — prosperity centers. Why has Silicon Valley come back?

Because first of all, the tech bubble bursting was way overstated, you know, "Oh, it's the end of the world" and all that. Yeah, the stocks were overvalued. From '97 to '99, the utilization of various information technologies, particularly telecommunications, increased at 500 percent a year worldwide. Nothing can sustain that. So you have stock, investment levels, premised on 500 percent growth per year — it's not gonna last. When the so-called collapse occurred which caused the mini-recession in 2001, you know what happened? They went from 500 percent a year to 50 percent a year. Most economic enterprises would kill for 50 percent growth per year. So Silicon Valley comes back strong.

You've got Orlando with those one hundred computer-simulation companies. They got into computer simulation because you have the Disney and Universal theme parks, and Electronic Arts' video-games division. And the Pentagon and NASA desperately need simulation, for different reasons. So there you've got the University of Central Florida, the biggest unknown university in America, fifty-six thousand students, changing curriculum, at least once a year, if not more often, to make sure they're meeting whatever their needs are, and they're recruiting more and more professors to do this kind of research that will lead to technology transfers to the companies. You've got Pittsburgh actually becoming a real hotbed of nanotechnology research. You've got San Diego, where there are more Nobel-prize-winning scientists living than any other city in America. You've got the University of California San Diego and other schools there training people to do genomic work. Qualcomm is headquartered there, and there are now seven hundred other telecom companies there, and you've got a big private foundation investing in this as well as the government, and nobody knows who's a Republican or who's a Democrat, they're just building this networking.

This is the kind of thing that works. I like it when the president goes to Detroit and talks about how we got the auto business back, because if the American people knew the details of that, they would not see it as a bailout; they would see it as a financial reconstruction that saved two million jobs, not just the eighty thousand more we got working in the auto industry but every car dealership, every mechanic in every car dealership, every salesman of the cars, you know, the whole structure of part suppliers, and all that. But that's what we need more of, things that will work. So then I think the auto restructuring directly led to the next big bipartisan agreement, which was on higher mileage standards for cars, which will create 150,000 jobs in the new technology, because you have the unions, the car ownerships, the foreign car owners, the companies that sell a lot of cars in America, the government, and then the management — everybody's working together.

I'd like to see the country, instead of being in just a deep funk about all the hideous problems we got — which are manifold — look at these islands of prosperity and see what works.

ESQUIRE: One thing that's changed profoundly since your presidency is that the average American worker has lost the sense that his destiny is in his own hands. How does globalization play out? Can you describe it in such a way that there's a good ending for the American middle class?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, every trade deal, including membership in the World Trade Organization, is not premised on unilateral disarmament; it's supposed to be about mutuality and mutual benefits. If you look at the countries with which we have really comprehensive trade agreements, we've got a trade balance. Our trade deficit is largely in oil, and with China and Japan, with which we don't have these comprehensive agreements. So I think the one thing that we've got to do is put ourselves in a position to enforce our agreements again. Yes, I did three hundred trade agreements. But even if the Bush administration had been inclined to bring as many enforcement actions as I did — and I haven't checked since the end of his first term, but at the end of his first term there was an 80 percent drop in trade-enforcement actions before the Trade Commission here in America and before the WTO. And that was related to the fact that our biggest trade deficit and our most thorny issues were with China, some with Japan, and they were our biggest lenders.

So when the president decided to simultaneously cut taxes, go into Afghanistan, go into Iraq, and then pass the senior-citizens drug program all on borrowed money, we became increasingly dependent on the foreign purchases of our debt to finance all this deficit spending. So in effect, our bankers were the people we had a beef with on trade. And it's hard to get into a trade war with your banker.

One of the reasons I want to see us adopt a long-term ten-year deficit-reduction plan, to begin as the economy is picking up, is that it gives us more independence. But yes, there is a good outcome. You can see it in the fact that the German unemployment rate is two points lower than ours, and they're three times as dependent as we are on exports, but with labor costs actually higher than ours, they still do a brilliant job of getting small businesses into the export market. So yes, but it won't be easy, and this is not the best time in the world to be trying to do it, when everybody is scared to death, but we're only 4 percent of the world's people, and there are a lot of smart people out there now in the rest of the world, and you can't keep the information and technology genie in the bottle. So if you wanna maintain 20 percent of the world's income with 4 percent of the world's people, you gotta first of all have more shared prosperity and shared growth. Wall Street's income is going to drop a lot this year, because there's only so much you can shove to the top when the middle is not expanding.

So yes, we can do it. But we can't put the walls up again. You couldn't do it even if you tried. They'll still just take it from you. And I believe we can do much more to adapt to the structural changes in the global economy, get high-end manufacturing back here, set up clusters of economic activity where you have, among other things, continuous retraining of people well into their middle years so they never become irrelevant to the current job market. We're going to have to train workers in every business the way the military trains. You know people, career military people, enlisted people, nonofficers, typically get some sort of new training every single year of their lives. It's just a part of being in the military. One of the reasons a lot of people stay is they pick up skill after skill after skill. And that's what we're going to have to do for the American worker.

ESQUIRE: You've been spending a lot of time in Haiti, and the work of your foundation has principally been focused on urgent global problems. But recently the Clinton Global Initiative has also redirected its efforts domestically, to America.

CLINTON: I just kept feeling that there was more possibility to create jobs in America without some huge government initiative. That if we could get businesses that are doing well together with people with good ideas, and with people that are doing training, and with banks that are willing to loan money under certain circumstances, then we could do some good. That's what led to CGI America. And the commitments we've gotten will create or fill existing vacancies that haven't been filled in months for more than 150,000 jobs and give more than twice that many people more-relevant job training. We also got another $265 million in direct commitments for investments of low-interest loans to small entrepreneurs, which is a big deal because the small-business loan rate in many areas has been going down even as the demand for the loans has recovered and, according to Pepperdine University, about 40 percent of American small businesses surveyed said they would hire more people if they could get the financing to do it.

We focused on the big things like infrastructure and what could be done at the state level. I asked people to assume, you know, no massive changes in Congress. Let's just talk about what we can do now. How we could expand employment and infrastructure. How we could do more on green buildings. How we could lower the veterans' unemployment rate, because these returning veterans have an unemployment rate roughly 25 percent higher than the national average. And we broke up into working groups and produced some commitments. The most notable one was the AFL-CIO committed to raise $10 billion to finance building retrofits.

You produce seven thousand jobs per billion dollars, so you can do the math. That's the kind of stuff I try to get people to focus on. We also had a wonderful commitment of a thousand jobs in the Joplin, Missouri, area, which was hit so hard by the tornado, to insource jobs that had been outsourced — call centers, for example. There's a real opportunity in rural America, places that have not participated in this modern economy at all. If you take advantage of the fact that technology abolishes distance, then you won't need to go to India. Just go to Indiana.

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Stay tuned for more from President Clinton — and the campaign trail in South Carolina and beyond — on The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce >>

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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