America’s CEO, Bill Clinton

Tina Brown writes about a place I wish I could have been, Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative conference at the Sheraton Hotel in New York last week

“Welcome to Planet Clinton, an interconnected world that’s a solar system and a wormhole away from Bush country. Here Shimon Peres and Oprah Winfrey are just members of the audience. Barbra Streisand looks like any peppy matron taking an extension course. Brad Pitt’s staccato hair and Angelina Jolie’s duvet lips (sighted in the audience of Jeffrey Sachs’s poverty panel) are reduced to a responsible human scale. Wandering out of a kitchen exit I found myself in a milling informal think tank with the former president expounding to the two guys who founded Google and a sprightly “Planet of the Apes” figure who turned out to be Mick Jagger.

A weird reputational exchange has taken place between Clinton and President Bush. After so much dishonest reasoning it’s the vaunted “CEO president” who begins to look like the callow, fumbling adolescent. And it’s the sexually incontinent, burger-guzzling, late-night-gabbing Bubba who is emerging as a great CEO of America.

“We are so arrogant because we are obsessed with the present,” he told his guests at the conference’s end. “I’ve reached an age now where it doesn’t matter whatever happens to me. I just don’t want anybody to die before their time anymore.”