Is Bill Clinton going to keep running the Clinton Global Initiative when his wife is President? I was talking with a friend the other day who thought the answer was obviously no. I thought the answer was obviously yes. Under the circumstances, it seems like the answer's not obvious.
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A Random Question
25 Jan 2008 02:16 pm
Comments (18)
Is Bill Clinton going to keep running the Clinton Global Initiative when his wife is President?
Would you mind using the word 'if' instead of the word 'when'? I'm a man of questionable health.
Oh so Matt,
The race is officially over? Obama will win all those black votes in South Carolina, rendering him "black" and that's all she wrote? Wait until he denounces race-based affirmative action. It ain't over!
Bill is going to do what Darrell Hammond said he would do: hang out with the First ladies from other countries.
I think the answer is obviously no. It would have tremendous potential for endless stories about quid-pro-quo. I suppose he could put it in some sort of blind trust, but I have no idea how that would work.
It is obvious that the reins should be turned over to George to create a Clinton Global Initiative of Funk.
In fact this should probably happen right now.
That's great & all, but how about some more TABLE?!!
One of Bubba's other ventures is pushing something that a) involves corruption and b) that he didn't disclose all the details of while pushing. Somehow I think MattY's response to this would be quite "patrician".
Is Bill Clinton going to keep running the Clinton Global Initiative when his wife is President?
Maybe he'll hand the reins over to Roger Clinton.
I'm with you, Matt.
Hell, no! He's going to hobnob with the Saudis until the bitter end.
he'll be nominated to the supreme court and to secretary of state -- just so that he will be too tired to play with the interns.
huh, Hillary wins? I just woke up in the deepest, fieriest pit of hell.
I love a really good nomination battle.
That question is boring.
What everyone really wants to know is what kind of poontang will Bill get when his wife is President?
Seriously, I'm surprised at how little commentary I've seen addressing the fact that if Hillary is elected, we are basically going to get what amounts to a two-person presidency, half of which is unelected and officially totally unaccountable. That alone gives me pause about the idea of voting for her. The idea that Bill will sideline himself and keep his fingers mostly out of the pot [ok, insert joke] doesn't really pass the laugh test.
Add up their statements: She'll run the bureaucracy, he'll run the country.
Seriously, I'm surprised at how little commentary I've seen addressing the fact that if Hillary is elected, we are basically going to get what amounts to a two-person presidency, half of which is unelected and officially totally unaccountable.
Well, right now we have a two-person presidency where one is a figurehead and the other wields all the power and is officially totally unaccountable (by his own determination). But I'll take Bill over Cheney any day.
Dude, the CGI isn't nearly corrupt enough to fully monetize Bill's position as First Husband.
Of course he'll stay. Why would he have started this thing up, knowing she was likely to run, if he was just going leave it in 2009?
There are interesting suggestions at the end of this article that they are thinking he would keep at it, but it's not clear where Senior was getting those suggestions apart from sources she quotes earlier in the piece:
October 8, 2007 New York Magazine
The First: Female President, Male First Lady, Former President in the White House
Contemplating Clinton II.
by Jennifer Senior
from page 4:
The solution Hillary has devised for her husband is an ideal one, in this respect. As a diplomat without portfolio, Bill Clinton would be extremely far from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He’d be on a 12,500-mile leash, sent all over the world to charm, forge deals, resurrect dead alliances, troubleshoot. “I think it’s a great role for him,” says Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary from 1995 to 1998 and, prior to that, spokesman for Warren Christopher’s State Department. “He’s not the classic negotiator, the kind who opens discussions with the structure of the arrangement he wants. He starts by probing the other person’s political position. So in this case, one could imagine he’d come out of these meetings and say, ‘Here’s what the guy needs.’ A tour d’horizon, or tour of the horizon, is what you call it in diplomatic parlance. And then he’d let others do the negotiations.” The beauty of such an arrangement is that while it keeps the former president out of the United States, allowing Hillary a wide berth, it still gives him a chance to engage in the three-dimensional chess of domestic politics—just not the domestic politics of his own country, but China’s or Lebanon’s instead. McCurry can imagine him in the Middle East; he can imagine him even making overtures to Pyongyang. “He understands and knows he can’t wander the West Wing willy-nilly,” says McCurry. “If he were here a lot, there’d be some kind of speculation, always, about the role he’s playing.”
This solution is not without pitfalls or potential collisions with her staff—especially her secretary of State, who’d have to tolerate being bigfooted from time to time (or with ego-annihilating regularity, who knows?). But for Bill Clinton, the role of roving diplomat at least holds out the possibility of his preserving a private life, and it’s patterned after the same globe-trotting, internationally focused model he’s selected for his own post-presidency. If he can figure out how to preserve that shell of a life, whether it be by keeping a toehold in Chappaqua and Harlem, attending yak-yaks in Aspen, continuing to play host to his Global Initiative, or, most important, continuing his work at the William J. Clinton Foundation, then both he and his wife will have triumphed. And if Hillary’s smart, she’ll make Africa a greater priority in her Clinton administration than he did in his, in order to help him combine his public role as world ambassador with his private role as foundation head. Her husband’s a demigod on stilts in that part of the world. And so is she. (People forget that it was Hillary who first took Bill to Africa in 1998, and not the other way around.) Shining the spotlight on the continent would also correct one of the most shameful parts of her husband’s legacy: the neglect of the genocide in Rwanda.
Comments closed February 08, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
I think we have a consensus that the answer is obvious. We just don't know what it is.
Posted by Njorl | January 25, 2008 2:41 PM