First, I’d like to thank The Reaction’s Michael J.W. Stickings, once again, for his terrific guest-blogging. It’s great to know I can step away for a day and leave the site in good hands.
Second, I thought I’d take a moment to tell readers where I was yesterday. I wasn’t entirely clear on the ground rules in advance, so I wasn’t able to mention it beforehand, but I was invited to attend a bloggers’ meeting with President Clinton yesterday at his office in Harlem. It was, to put it mildly, a tremendous experience.
Apparently, about a year ago, the former President began reading blogs, from both sides of the aisle, and his daily press clippings compiled by his staff includes blog posts of particular interest. It seems to have piqued his interest in the medium, how blogs fit into the left’s infrastructure, what the impact the medium has on news dissemination overall. It led to yesterday’s meeting between Clinton, some of his aides, and 15 bloggers. As you might imagine, I was honored to be there.
I took some notes, but the one thing that stands out about chatting with Clinton is his vast knowledge of, well, everything. It was a very wide-ranging discussion, but the former President never lacked for fascinating insights and anecdotes about every subject that came up. The Middle East, gun control, the estate tax, domestic security, the media, even saxophone players … the man is practically an encyclopedia. Aravosis, whom I sat next to, described him as “smart as hell,” which seems to describe Clinton quite well.
He knows a lot about everything, and he gets it, he gets politics, he gets people, he understands what’s going on and knows how to get things done. His political advice is no-nonsense and straight forward – he’d rather take an issue on than run from it (oh for the days of that in a Democratic politician).
Indeed.
Clinton was scheduled to speak with us for an hour, but he was engaged enough with our discussion to stay an extra hour. I took that as a very encouraging sign — he not only thought enough of our work to set up a meeting, but also thought we were worth devoting even more time to.
I make no secret of the fact that Clinton is a hero of mine, and has been since 1991. With this in mind, yesterday was a pretty important afternoon for me, personally and professionally. Here’s a shot, by the way, that I stole from AmericaBlog.
That’s me in the back, next to Clinton, with his head tilted slightly in my direction.
As for final impressions, I think I’ll just quote Chris Bowers, whom I also sat next to.
I felt a tremendous swelling of patriotic pride and love for America when I attended this meeting. Here I was, with a group of my friends and colleagues, meeting with one of our nation’s Presidents because our small, do-it-yourself political operation had drawn his attention. I mean, this is largely work I have completed and a movement to which I have contributed from the bedroom of my apartment in West Philly. Somehow, in only a few years, this resulted in meeting with a former President of the United States. As I was thinking about this, I quickly remembered that President Clinton attended a public high school Arkansas (as I did in Liverpool, New York), and rose to become President of the United States. And here we were, conversing with one another as citizens, overlooking the New York City skyline, which is quite possibly the greatest architectural achievement in the history of humanity. And we were doing it in a neighborhood, Harlem, which has never been particularly wealthy but whose residents produced some of the greatest works of art worldwide in the 20th century. It was a dizzying and remarkable moment that reminds you just what the true promise of this nation really is, of the greatness we have achieved, and of the still yet untapped potential of America to accomplish far greater things still.
Well said, Chris; I felt the same way.