BILL CLINTON AT GEORGETOWN October 19, 2006
Posted by wmmbb in Category to be ascribed.trackback
Here is Bill Clinton addressing Georgetown University in Washington.
See The Raw Story for a full transcript of his speech. Here is a short extract:
The professors that I had then affected me in ways that continue in my life today. And the most important point I can make about that for the purposes of my remarks today is that I really believed more strongly when I left here than when I came that ideas matter, that evidence matters, that thinking and reasoning matter, that ideas have consequences and that in politics that means ideas lead to policies which have positive or negative effects in people’s lives.
I believed that then, I believe that now.
I believed then, based on the experiences I had here, that not everyone who disagreed with me was my enemy, that I might be wrong; that as forcefully as I pursued anything I believed in and any argument that I embraced, I had to always be willing to listen to others; and that in the interplay, the dialectic, between my position and another, the searching for more facts, the searching for better argument and, frankly, just facing the evidence of what did and didn’t work and what the consequences of various courses were, that I would come to a better place as a public official. I believed that then, I believe that now.
Clinton articulates, I think well, the distinction between holding a philosophy and employing an ideology, and what theat means for the practice and outcomes of politics. Elder Statesman now, or otherwise, I would interpret his remarks in the context of the mid term elections. And yet my sense is that the distincion made is useful. He does not acknowledge that philosophies are more difficult to form, enmeshed as they are in the long-running symposium, which began long before we entered the room, whereas ideology provides the read-made solution. Ideology on this basis is more likely on any question than philosophy. Then there are some of us who never seem to have made up our mind, even with the assistance of ideology.
Let me correct for the record, one of Bill’s book references:
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