The New Bill Clinton

RD: Your daughter, Chelsea, got married last July. Are you having any trouble adjusting to her new status?
BC: It’s a real life passage, you know, but I’ve known this guy [new son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky] for half his life. They never went out until three years ago, and they’ve been friends a long time. I admire him, I love him and I think it was time for her to do it. I trust my daughter. She has always had good judgment about life.

RD: Have you started to think about being a grandfather?
BC: Oh, it’s up to them, but I’ll tell you this: Hillary wants to be a grandmother much more than she ever wanted to be a president.

RD: Let’s talk about the Clinton Global Initiative. You have your “four pillars” – health security, economic empowerment, citizen service, leadership development. But even when you narrow all the world’s problems to those four areas, there are still more needs than you could ever address. How do you choose the specific issues you’re going to tackle?
BC: One of the things we try to do is modulate them and shape them every year based on what our members want. Over the next year we will introduce commitments specifically designed to perform some good thing, like making a country or community more energy independent but also job intensive. Or, how can we improve education opportunities for women and girls who are likely to be left out of the educational systems – and economic systems – of their countries? How can we use technology that benefits not just people like our kids but also low-income kids in the United States and around the world?

RD: You’ve been involved with Haiti for 35 years. You’ve visited there, you sent US armed forces to stabilise things when you were president – you obviously care about the Haitian people. But Haiti seems to have failed to provide that “leadership development” quotient that CGI deems so important. To many people, it seems that Haiti won’t get back on its feet unless it has a political system that works better.
BC: I’m convinced they know that without a political and governance system that can produce good decisions, they cannot build a sustainable country. What I’m trying to do with this commission – it’s half Haitians and half donors – is to build the capacity of Haitian society and the capacity of the Haitian government to make Haiti a self-supporting country over the long run. Whether or not we can do it, I don’t know, but we’re trying, and at least they know that’s the issue, and so do I.