The last couple of days in New York have provided a chance to compare the styles of two presidents and a nearly-president. On Tuesday George W Bush spoke to the UN. On Wednesday, a few blocks from the UN, Bill Clinton opened his 2007 Clinton Global Initiative. And - in the opening session - he shared a platform with Al Gore. Rather to my surprise, I thought the famously wooden Gore gave the most impressive and charismatic performance of the three men - aided by the fact that the opening session of the CGI focused heavily on his special subject: climate change.

Relations betweeen the Gore and Clinton camps have been tense since 2000 when, in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal, Gore’s presidential campaign deliberately tried to put some distance between him and Clinton. But in the opening CGI session, the two men seemed to get on fine. In fact, I rather longed for Gore to disrupt the sugary sweetness of the occasion by making a shock announcement that he will run for the presidency against Hillary. That would have put Bill on the spot.

Clinton’s presentation was a reminder of his formidable ability to combine personal charm, with a nerdy command of policy detail and relentless optimism. He still favours argument by anecdote. Clinton’s favourite rhetorical technique is to outline some huge policy problem, and then point to a local example - preferably combined with an uplifting personal story - that points the way forward and shows that all problems are soluble. In the opening panel, Clinton used Lee Scott - the boss of Walmart, who was also on the platform - as a sort of prop.

Scott’s initiatives on new energy saving light bulbs were taken as a shining example of the way forward.

You can see the political attractions of this sort of approach. It can be inspiring, if you like cheesy anecdotes, and it also makes large abstract issues easier to grasp, by personalising and localising them. Above all Clinton strives to define away hard choices, by turning everything into a "win, win" situation. He is quite frank about this. He argued at the CGI that "we don’t have the right to ask anyone in the world to stay poor". So it is crucial to show that developing countries can actually grow faster if they embrace clean energy. Politically, this is an extremely attractive approach. But there is a snag. It may well not be true. There really are difficult choices and "inconvenient truths" that need to be acknowledged.

That is why I found Gore - mister inconvenient truth himself - more compelling. His approach seemed a little less glib. It is true that by talking about a Marshall Plan to combine job creation with fighting climate change, Gore was embracing the central Clintonian idea - that growth and the fight against global warming have to be combined. But Gore also seemed franker about just how difficult this will be. He was also passionate and alarming about the urgency of the problem. His suggestion that the polar ice cap could disappear within 23 years was chilling (sorry).

By contrast, the man who pipped Gore to the presidency in 2000 still seems a little too relaxed about the problem. It is true that President Bush has moved on the issue. He now frankly acknowledges that there is a big problem, that mankind has contributed to global warming and that carbon-emissions need to be cut. But he is still resisting the idea of binding, international targets. Bush is about to convene his own global warming summit in Washington. But many people at the UN and at the Clinton Global Initiative still see the Bush administration’s approach as a distraction and an impediment to a genuine global agreement. If Gore is right about the polar ice cap, even one more year without real American leadership on global warming is a big worry.

September 27th, 2007 in Climate change | Permalink