Bill Clinton, the ultimate celebrity president. How fondly we recall the late-night sax solos, the roguish grin, the rope lines.
No surprise, therefore, that Clinton is so at ease in a recent video celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Clinton Foundation. The video stars a hapless bunch of celebrity strategists for the Foundation, including Matt Damon, Ben Stiller, and Kristin Wiig. Their total contributions consist of “everyone hold their breath for one minute to stop releasing carbon dioxide” and “Clinton Foundation softball team.” The President is the rimshot incarnate, revealing himself at the end to be both Sean Penn’s lunch thief and Kevin Spacey’s crank-call accomplice. It’s like Celebrity Jeopardy went to West Wing Camp. Imagine the behind-the-scenes reminiscences: Guys, remember that time when Carville stole Susan Sarandon’s panties and ran them up the flagpole?
To be fair, it is nice to see a political figure josh around after watching the Republican candidates huff and puff and blow each other’s illegally-manicured houses down. But the tagline for the Clinton Foundation, “fighting global issues through business-oriented solutions” gave me whiplash. I assure you that this reaction was separate from the fact that Jack Black was the one singing those words.
It’s hardly a secret that Clinton was the ultimate neoliberal. But it is worth remembering that in a political climate where government is still successfully framed as “the problem,” Democrats are just as guilty of promoting the marketplace as the appropriate vehicle for improving social welfare. Business-oriented solutions is a phrase that sounds great to hedge funders, oil sheiks, and corporate tycoons, many of whom are eager to believe they can make the world better without giving up any power or substantial resources. It’s a kind of thinking that leads people to think that private enterprise can do a better job at not just business but at saving the world too. But Mitt Romney is poised to benefit a lot more from that political framework than, say Bangladeshi farmers.
We should consider ten years of neoliberalism in the guise of philanthropy a thoroughly problematic legacy. Clinton, and the Third Way movement within the Democratic party, was what made it acceptable for boomers to reconcile their economic success with their socially liberal values. Once liberal values could become detached from economic equality, even self-purported liberals could promote and benefit from the very deregulation and concentration of wealth that has so corroded our country. The (I think it’s safe to say) presumptive Republican nominee would have us believe that our whole country needs a “business-oriented solution” to our economic woes. The movie star president who laid the groundwork for us to buy that line was not Reagan. It was the Democrat’s own beloved celebrity.
