President Bill Clinton appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday and had a chance to speak out about the Clinton Global Initiative and Africa. When pressed by MTP host Tom Brokaw about why Americans facing an economic crisis should care about global poverty, Clinton remarked that providing aid to Africa addressed the two main concerns in the upcoming US presidential election– namely, “how to restore economic strength and broadly shared prosperity and how to restore America’s position in the world.”
MR. BROKAW: When you ran successfully for president in 1992, the unofficial slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s hard to imagine, given the political and especially the financial climate that we’re all living in now that someone can say it’s about aid to Africa, stupid, or it’s about AIDS, stupid, or it’s about doing something about poverty, stupid. Is this not going to be an issue, your great work here as the Clinton Global Initiative, in this campaign? Is it going to have to be set off to the side?
PRES. CLINTON: Well, I think the answer is it will not–it’s not nearly as big an issue for the two thirds of American people who are having trouble paying their own bills and are worried about their future. On the other hand, I think there–the two great issues in America in this election are how to restore economic strength and broadly shared prosperity and how to restore America’s position in the world. I think–if I were making the CGI argument in a political speech, I’d say we’re not going to have the America we want unless prosperity is broadly shared, and to do that, we have to have economic opportunity in the poorest parts of America. And in the world, the places where America is popular today in the world, really popular, 10 countries in central and eastern Africa. Look at the Pew poll. Wildly popular. Why? Because they see us through the prism of President Bush’s AIDS and malaria programs and the work the Gates Foundation does, the work that I do, the work that others do. So we can–this should be presented to the American people that as a part of our participation in the interdependent world, we actually make more partners and fewer enemies.
MR. BROKAW: One of the concerns that the Gates Foundation has, that everything coming out of Africa that is reported is doom and gloom, and they say there are real success stories there.
PRES. CLINTON: Absolutely.
MR. BROKAW: And the American people need to hear about that.
PRES. CLINTON: The American–first of all, I wish we could have a cessation in the use of the word Africa for just 18 months while America learns that Africa is a continent that just in sub-Saharan Africa has 48 separate countries, and that it’s not just the geography, it’s the politics, the culture, the language, everything is different, and that yes, there’s been bad news in Darfur, yes, there’s been bad news out of Zimbabwe, but you have country after country after country with very high growth rates and remarkable progress. I mean, Rwanda, genocide in ’94, 10 percent of the country dies in 90 days. Four years later, their per capita income still well under $300 a year, 10 years later, $1,000 a year. Nearly quadrupled their per capita income. That’s the real Africa. That is far more representative of what the African people are doing and can do tomorrow than the other, and I really wish every time we talked about it–you should discuss it with your news people–whether we would mention a country. You might say, “Oh, by the way, it’s in Africa,” but we’ve got to stop thinking of Africa as a monolith.
MR. BROKAW: Mr. President, thank you very much.
