Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (41 page)

He brushed aside discussion of Hillary’s presidential prospects as premature until after November 2006. “I haven’t permitted myself to think much about it, or to talk to her about it, for the simple reason that I believe that you have to be in the election you’re in—and if you start thinking about the next campaign, you may not get to the next campaign,” he said. “I think she will be overwhelmingly reelected, because she deserves to be, if and only if she maintains the present level of focus on this election.”

Then he added, “But after she is reelected, if she wants to talk to me about it, I’ll be honored to talk about it.” And he admitted doubting that Americans were ready to elect “any woman” to the presidency, no matter what they might say to pollsters.

In May 2006, nearly a year after Clinton first presented the Alliance for a Healthier Generation with Mike Huckabee and the American Heart Association, the new group called the press to Harlem for an unexpected announcement. Following lengthy negotiations with the nation’s largest beverage companies, led by Ira Magaziner, those firms and the industry’s trade group had signed an unprecedented agreement with AHG to help curb obesity by ending the sale of sugary soft drinks in American public schools.

The ban on high-calorie sodas and “sports drinks” would be complete within four years, removing any drink with more than 100 calories per 12-ounce serving from school vending machines and cafeterias by 2010. According to the president of the American Beverage Association, Ralph Crowley, who ran a regional soda company in New England, the agreement would cost beverage companies an estimated $100
million over four years to replace vending machines and other equipment.

Acknowledging how difficult it is to change an entire culture of consumption, Clinton told reporters, “We’re turning a huge ship around in the middle of the ocean before it hits an iceberg.”

The deal would entirely eliminate soda and other sugar-heavy drinks such as apple and grape juice from the nation’s elementary schools, in the hope of inculcating healthy habits at the earliest age, while in high schools drinks such as diet soda, diet lemonade, and diet iced tea would be permitted along with bottled water.

By coming in to negotiate this agreement, Clinton and his allies may have saved Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Cadbury-Schweppes, and other soda manufacturers from lawsuits planned by the same public health advocates and law firms that had successfully pursued Big Tobacco a decade earlier. Such organizations, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Public Health Advocacy Institute, had been threatening to sue the soft drink companies for endangering children by marketing their products in schools. Leaders of those groups immediately welcomed the deal, while casting doubt on the motives of the industry.

“The childhood obesity crisis isn’t a partisan issue,” said Eric Schlosser, author of the bestselling exposé
Fast Food Nation,
who lauded Clinton and Huckabee. “Republican and Democratic kids are becoming unhealthy. The sugars in soda make up a large part of the extra caloric intake in the diets of young people, and soda consumption has played a role in the rise of childhood obesity.” Schlosser said he was “happy . . . the companies have agreed to do the right thing.”

Richard Daynard, president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute and a law professor at Northeastern University, told the
Boston Globe
that he had sought a similar agreement with the beverage companies for several months—under a continuing threat of litigation. “I think this agreement is about as voluntary as a shotgun wedding,” said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition studies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Coke and Pepsi are doing this to address the wave of legislation and litigation they were facing.”

Yet if Clinton was riding a wave of public concern, his intervention nevertheless had moved the beverage companies to adopt a more
responsible approach, without wasting years in courthouses and legislative chambers. If the deal achieved its objectives, then millions of children across the country would consume billions fewer empty calories every year—which, as Magaziner quietly informed reporters, could mean that those same kids would weigh up to twenty pounds less by the time they graduated high school.

With the soft drink deal in place, Clinton told reporters that he looked forward to negotiating similar agreements to change the quality and quantity of the “snack foods” that were making American children fat and sick. “We are eating more fast food and got into this super-size culture. I used to be a part of it,” he said, alluding to his own past poor eating habits. “I don’t think there are any villains here. I don’t think anybody realized this confluence of forces could produce such results.”

Villainous as the corporate giants might indeed be, Clinton understood that demonizing them would delay their arrival at the negotiating table. His preferred way of doing business was to make friends, not enemies, and to seek consensus, not conflict. That style didn’t always serve him or his causes well, but it was certainly a way of achieving deals in a combative atmosphere.

By then, the AHG had already hired an ambitious new executive director named Ginny Ehrlich, former director of school nutrition for the progressive Oregon Education Department—and they were already talking with industry behemoths like Kraft Foods about how to improve what kids ate as well as what they drank.

Within five months, Clinton would again summon reporters to Harlem to announce another agreement, this time in a high school gymnasium. Kraft, candy maker Mars, yogurt manufacturer Dannon, chip maker Pepsico, and Campbell Soup entered into a deal limiting saturated fat, sugar, and sodium and eliminating trans fats in the snacks sold in school vending machines—while promoting alternative choices such as baked chips that met nutrition guidelines set by the American Heart Association. This entirely voluntary arrangement met with more skepticism from health advocates than the soft drink deal, but Clinton defended it as a “first step.”

In announcing the beverage deal, he had pointed out that state and municipal governments could still pass even more restrictive regulations. He didn’t attempt to discourage them. “I think that the states
are and always have been laboratories of democracy. Nothing in this agreement prohibits them from doing something else or something different.”

If Clinton’s post-presidential concerns sometimes appeared diffuse and unrelated, that didn’t discourage him from pursuing problems that seemed urgent to him—sometimes arising from his own experience, other times arising from the frustrations of his presidency. Among the issues that had troubled him most as president was climate change, both because he had proved unable to draw attention to the problem, even among his fellow Democrats, and because he felt the consequences for civilization were likely to be so grave.

“During my second term, I spent a lot of time on it,” he recalled. “I gave a couple of very serious speeches on it that elicited a giant yawn. And then even the Democrats voted against the Kyoto Treaty, Democrats from energy-producing states. I just could not get anybody to take it seriously.”

Although as president Clinton had signed the Kyoto protocol in November 1998, he never submitted the treaty for ratification to the U.S. Senate, which had already passed a resolution condemning it. By 2006, however, many more elected officials in the United States and around the world were taking climate seriously—notably, an alliance of eighteen big city mayors led by the British Labour leftist Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, who were seeking ways to move forward despite the repeated failures of national governments and the U.N. With cities accounting for an estimated 75 percent of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, changing policies and habits in major urban areas could make a significant difference.

Magaziner had taken notice of the mayors’ group and brought them to Clinton’s attention in January 2006. Both were intrigued by the idea that the Clinton Foundation could somehow augment or even join their effort. He assigned some young researchers to explore how the foundation might address global warming. “I really wanted to do something in clean energy because I thought it was consistent with what we had done in the AIDS space, trying to figure out how to do more with less money, prove it’s economically beneficial,” Clinton later said.

And as with the AIDS crisis, he felt there was “no need for me just giving a lot of speeches about it. I thought Al Gore had done everything humanly possible in terms of making the arguments, trying to prove the science. . . . I didn’t think there needed to be anybody else doing that. But somebody needed to be out there, proving we could do this”—that is, demonstrating the case for an economically viable shift from fossil fuels to conservation and renewable energy sources. For him the real proof of any concept—in retrofitting large commercial buildings to save energy or revamping bus fleets to run on renewable fuel—came when it could be brought “to scale.” Big-city mayors had the political power to drive such plans.

In April, Magaziner went to London to meet with Nicky Gavron, the deputy mayor who ran the international cities group for Livingstone. As she later told a reporter for
The Atlantic
, Magaziner made a compelling pitch: “We’ve got this track record [on AIDS], and we can assemble talent very quickly.” Her first thought was to ask Magaziner for money, but “he said, on the spot, ‘We don’t want to back you; we want to be your partner.’ ” Clinton and Magaziner also believed that they could indeed raise money for a climate initiative, from potential donors, eventually including Kathryn Murdoch, daughter-in-law of the notorious media mogul.

Over the next few months Magaziner and Gavron, along with representatives of other cities, began to negotiate an agreement, under which a new division of the Clinton Foundation, known as the Clinton Climate Initiative, would serve as the “operational arm” of the joint project as it grew to encompass more than forty major cities and became known as “the C-40.” They drew in local leaders who were already friendly to Clinton, including the dynamic young Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his San Francisco counterpart, Gavin Newsom.

On August 1, they announced this broad new international partnership in Los Angeles at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, with Clinton flanked onstage by Villaraigosa, Newsom, Livingstone—and the London mayor’s political antagonist Tony Blair, whose centrist leadership of the Labour Party often irked the man known as “Red Ken.” (Blair was in California to sign a climate-cooperation agreement with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Golden State’s maverick Republican
governor, who dissented emphatically from his party’s troglodyte approach to global warming.)

While Livingstone and Villaraigosa expounded on methods they had used to curb automobile traffic and plant millions of trees, Clinton explained how the Clinton Climate Initiative planned to help large cities work together to achieve an ambitious 80 percent decrease in carbon emissions over the coming decades. “It sounds like a daunting task,” he said. “I don’t believe it is.”

Clinton believed that the climate initiative could succeed if it followed the methodology pioneered by the AIDS initiative, which was why he had encouraged Magaziner to take the lead. Like CHAI, which drew together national governments to achieve purchasing power, CCI would do the same for cities seeking to buy clean energy goods such as photovoltaic cells, lithium-diode street lights, or electric buses. Like CHAI, which advised government health ministries on best practices, training personnel, and implementing effective systems, CCI would provide similar expertise to cities needing technical assistance to reduce emissions. And like CHAI, which spent much effort on measuring outcomes—what Clinton always called “keeping score”—CCI would also create more precise tools to track the cities’ progress.

But beyond all the wonkish projections and promises, Clinton didn’t try to avoid the partisan aspect of climate change. He had never upbraided Bush publicly over his administration’s fealty to the pharmaceutical manufacturers; now, however, he pointed out forcefully that the White House had failed to address global warming—and warned of a planetary catastrophe unless people and policymakers took concerted action. “The entrenched thought patterns and economic interests of yesterday are our common enemy,” he said. To demonstrate its seriousness, CCI immediately dispatched several staffers on sales calls to introduce the cities project to mayors around the world.

For Clinton, his summer trip to Africa was becoming an important annual milestone, rendered more significant in 2006 by the presence of a
New York Times
reporter, who happened to be capable of examining the gritty philanthropic work beneath the glittering political surface. Celia Dugger, daughter of the radical Texas journalist and activist Ron
nie Dugger, knew the territory well. She had traveled throughout Africa and Asia for years, covering issues of poverty and development for the paper.

During the previous winter and spring, Dugger and Donald McNeil, Jr., had produced a compelling seven-part series for the
Times
on diseases such as guinea worm, measles, and river blindness that were “on the brink” of complete elimination, if only adequate support were made available from world health authorities. She had already won major awards for international reporting, and the series on eradicable diseases would earn a few more.

The difference in her approach was not a lack of skepticism about Clinton’s motives and record. Dugger was more than willing to question the former president sharply about what he had (and had not) done to stop the AIDS pandemic during his presidency, and didn’t hesitate to remind him of assorted other shortcomings. Yet she was deeply interested in seeing what he had accomplished out of office—and had the knowledge and experience to understand what she saw.

Following Clinton through Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, and Lesotho, Dugger filed a 2,700-word dispatch that appeared on the paper’s August 29 front page, which opened on a scene of the former president at a rural hospital, holding the hands of children who were “alive because of the AIDS medicines his foundation donated.”