Following are excerpts from The Chronicle’s interview with former President Bill Clinton, who was in Maputo, Mozambique.
How are you going to leverage your prestige as a former president and other resources to advance your philanthropic priorities?
What I do is try not to have my foundation reinvent the wheel or become a separate huge bureaucracy, but to facilitate the work that other people do, or bring other people in.
So when I was asked to help rebuild western India, in Gujarat, after the earthquake, we set up an American India Foundation, and I went on the board. And we give them a lot of support.
But I wanted them to have their own staff, their own foundation. [I wanted] the American Indian community to assume ownership of what we were doing so that it would become like all the American Jewish groups’ activities in Israel. And so if I dropped dead, the work would still go on.
So I try to do that a lot.
And I can bring people in and leverage resources. I try to use the fact that I have a lot of public-spirited friends who are interested in doing these things, so that when I get involved it’s not just me, it’s other people.
There are so many worthy causes and priorities at home and abroad. Can you take us through how you decided which ones you wanted to focus on and how you choose the strategies you would use to make a difference?
So you leave the White House and you’re not president any more. You lose a lot of power. But your power is often broadly spread. So you have to trade power for influence and impact. If you want to swap power for influence and impact, you have to take advantage of the one thing that happens that’s a plus when you give the power up, which is that you get to decide how to spend your time for the first time in years and years.
You get to get up every morning and basically decide what you are going work on, decide I’m going to do this and I’m not going do that. And if I don’t [do one thing or another], nobody will care, nobody will even notice, because I’m not president anymore.
So you try to find the things that you care the most about, that you think are of real importance, and where you also think you can have an impact.
For example, I care a lot about peace in the Middle East. And actually I still talk to them all [Middle East officials] a lot. But I could have no impact there unless I had an official position authorized by the government. So that’s one where it can’t be on your list because even if you care about it, and you could have an impact, you can’t, because you don’t have the portfolio.
So the things that I’ve decided that I should concentrate on [include] the economic empowerment of poor people in poor communities at home and abroad, because I can do something about that.
[Another] thing I try to work on is basically self-governance: helping people solve their own problems. And I spent a lot of time in Latin America in the last two years helping to deal with financial challenges.
I try to help people. If they are willing to solve the problem, I try to get people to come help them solve their own problems.
And finally, I’m doing this AIDS work [promoting education and treatment in Africa and elsewhere]. Because I believe it is the single most significant health-care problem in the world, and I think if we don’t deal with it, it will cause fragile democracies to fall; it will lead to more civil wars and more murders and more devastation.
So now, you asked, how did I decide which ones. I decided based on importance and potential impact. Are they important to me, are they important in a larger sense -- can I make a difference? If the answer was Yes, then I took them up.
But you have to have enough discipline that you don’t say Yes to everything; otherwise, you may not have a discernable impact on anything.
So I’ve tried to make the right calls, and I think on balance we’ve done a good job.
I think our scorecard at the end of my nearly two years out of office, in terms of what we’ve done to advance the public interest and how many lives we’ve touched and how many people are better off, I think it’s going to be quite impressive.
Is there any unfinished business from your presidency that you would like to try to advance through organized philanthropy?
Sure. I’ll just give you one example. One of the last pieces of legislation I signed -- maybe the last major bill I signed -- was the New Markets Initiative, which was designed to build on our empowerment zone program to create incentives for people to invest in core communities.
But it’s like I told the folks out here [at an economic development roundtable in Mozambique that took place before this interview]: It doesn’t make any difference what the government does with new markets if the community itself is not prepared to accept and attract such opportunities.
People don’t go places for tax incentives alone. So I like what I’m doing with poor communities, [empowering] poor people in poor communities. That’s really exciting because I think it’s important within America and around the world.
One of the things I didn’t get done was that I tried to change the tax laws to help promote philanthropy more. We had a huge increase in philanthropy when I was president.
I would still like to get that done, and my wife [Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York] is working on that as well in the Senate now. I wish that I had been able to get the tax code in the way I think it should be -- to maximize the incentives for people to give and then to maximize the impact of the money once the philanthropic organizations have it.
But I still have some hope of that.
That’s another reason the estate tax should not be completely repealed, in my view.
What do you think of President Bush’s efforts to promote national service?
I think President Bush did a good thing to embrace the national service movement and ask Congress to expand it.
We had 49 governors who urged that AmeriCorps be reauthorized and he was one of them [as Texas governor], and so was his brother [as Florida governor], in my last year as president. And his father was good on the community-service issues.
So I hope he [current President Bush] will continue to support it. I’m very grateful for that.
What do you think of President Bush’s efforts to expand the role of religious groups in providing social services?
I think there should be greater collaboration between government and faith-based groups, and I generally supported that [as president]. There are all kinds of obvious and self-evident church-state issues that you have to be sensitive to. Faith-based groups are better at some social challenges than others.
So I think you can’t be indiscriminate. But basically I favor that. And we actually did more with faith-based groups than had previously been done, in the years I served as president.
Are there other issues you’d like to discuss?
I’ve been really worried that if people get spooked over the stock market going down, they may quit giving. I’ve been really worried about it.
I want people to know in general that the money they give [to charity] is actually well spent.
I mean, if people help us do this stuff [charitable efforts], we can actually show you how lives are changed. And that’s not just me; that’s most philanthropic giving.
You know, you see all these stories about, oh, this or that charity, and they stay in expensive hotels and they fly to this place and do all this stuff. That happens some, but one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview was to promote not just what I’m doing, but the idea in general that philanthropy is good.
Most people get their money’s worth out of philanthropy. There are a lot of phenomenally effective things going on. And I worry that the only kind of generic press that we [in philanthropy] have is when it’s bad.