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Bill Clinton Defends DLC on Poverty
Former President Bill Clinton defended the Democratic Leadership Council against those who question the relevance of the centrist organization in today's political landscape. Clinton, the former Arkansas governor who was the Democratic Leadership Council's chairman before being elected president in 1992, said his terms in office serve as an example of why the group's message is important. "When people criticize the 1990s, they have to live in an evidence-free world," Clinton said Monday, citing job creation and economic statistics from his two terms in office. Clinton said he gets riled by the charge that the DLC cares more about the middle class than about poverty reduction, which he called the "the issue du jour." Clinton said the DLC's platform has always focused on lifting people out of poverty.
"The only way you can expand the middle class is to move people from poverty into it - unless you're trying to make rich people poorer," he said. "The last time I checked, the best anti-poverty program was a job."
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Clinton only made fleeting references in his nearly hour-long speech to the current crop of Democrats vying for the presidential nomination - including his wife, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. "I really do like them all, though clearly I do have a favorite," he said. He briefly touched on the argument between his wife and Democratic rival Barack Obama, who have debated how far the U.S. should be willing to go in its diplomacy with countries such as Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Obama said it was a disgrace that the U.S. won't hold talks with those countries. Clinton said she would not meet in the first year of her presidency with the leaders of those five nations, before knowing what their intentions were. After the debate, she called Obama naive.
"I don't want to get in the middle of that whole spat Hillary and Sen. Obama had, but there's more than one way to practice diplomacy," Bill Clinton said.
He said all the major Democratic candidates had "a vigorous agreement on the big question, which is 'Should we have more diplomacy?' The answer is yes. Then you can parse their answers to the specific questions and decide who you think is right. "I've heard no fewer than four candidates in the last month remind us that in the middle of the Cold War, in the darkest hours, we never stopped talking to the Soviets at some level. So nobody disputes that. And we're going to have to do that." Clinton also said free trade - a major element of the DLC agenda - has come under fire by critics of globalization. But the former president blamed the current administration for not enforcing trade agreements vigorously enough. "You can't have free and fair trade unless you enforce the rules," he said. "I'm all for making deals with other people, but when somebody makes a deal they ought to keep it." Clinton said there should also be more labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, but policymakers shouldn't lose sight of the importance of trade. "We're 4 percent of the world's people; we have about 25 percent of its annual income," he said. "In order to keep that, we've got to sell something to the other 96 percent of the world."
© 2007 Associated Press.
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