Second Coming

New York, New York It was almost midnight at the Manhattan sushi hotspot Nobu Fifty Seven, and Bill Clinton was briefing Elvis Costello on the future of New Orleans. "First you've got to flush the lake. Just flush it," Clinton explained. Between the low thrum of club music and the starstruck admirers jockeying for position, it was impossible to hear much more, but one thing was clear: Clinton was really enjoying himself. As several celebrities--including Jeremy Piven of HBO's "Entourage," millionaire playboy Steve Bing, and the dapper Nobu himself-- hovered on the margins, Clinton talked on ... and on ... and on. A few minutes earlier, Costello had looked starstruck himself. But now, his enthusiasm seemed to be waning. In fact, as Clinton droned on, I detected a certain glaze forming behind the smartly dressed rocker's famous black-rimmed glasses.If Clinton noticed, he didn't care. These are the moments he lives for. This was the first evening of the Clinton Global Initiative--a sprawling three-day extravaganza that was equal parts Davos, Renaissance Weekend, charitable telethon, and self-celebration. The stated purpose of the conference was to bring together top thinkers and leaders from public and private life to help devise solutions to intractable world problems. But, most of all, this was the Bill Clinton show--a chance for the ex-president to talk an endless number of hapless (though often rich and famous) souls like Costello blue in the face. Clinton's pathological need for adulation is welldocumented. (When a friend of mine--who is not famous and had never spoken with Clinton before--ran into the ex-president at a hotel gym recently, he had to fabricate an excuse to escape his long-winded ruminations.) But, in New York last week, Clinton was after something more. It's not a jealous effort to remind Americans that life was better under his presidency, something he seemed keen to do during the first term of the Bush administration. Indeed, Clinton has steadily evolved into a less partisan figure: He has raised money for tsunami victims with the first President Bush and even appeared with George W. in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, declining to join the post-Katrina attacks on the Bush administration--all of which has some fellow Democrats exasperated. "People want to tell him, `Do you remember the fucking things [the Bushies] said about you when you left office? Stealing furniture and trashing the place?'" one Clintonite whispered to me. But no, it seems that Clinton doesn't want to remember. He has other plans, a larger mission that transcends the petty squabbles of U.S. politics. And his weekend in Midtown Manhattan offered a clue to what it is. In some ways, Clinton's summit was reminiscent of his free-form White House bull sessions. The guest list of about 2,000 attendees included dozens of old Clintonites, including Terry McAuliffe, Sandy Berger, Mack McLarty, Bruce Lindsey, George Stephanopoulos, Robert Rubin, Ira Magaziner, Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, and John Podesta. But now there were also corporate moguls (Richard Parsons of Time Warner, Starbucks CEO Jim Donald), dignitaries (Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, the emir of Qatar, King Abdullah II of Jordan), save-the- world celebrities (Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Bono), and even Republicans (Rubert Murdoch, Condoleezza Rice, Elizabeth Cheney). All told, the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers on 7th Avenue had become a kind of modern-day Mount Olympus. The conference's specific topics were suitably grandiose: poverty, climate change, religious strife, and Third World governance. Even by Clinton's standards, these issues were considered in Oprah-esque fashion. The conference's several panel discussions were held on stages where participants reclined in pristine white armchairs under soft hues of pink and blue. (One discussion opened with a Coldplay soundtrack as Rice, Blair, and Abdullah strolled onstage.) Before another panel, a female staffer appeared in the media center. "Poverty? Poverty? Follow me," she said, before leading a clutch of hacks past a sign that read the escape from poverty and into a dimly lit ballroom. Inside, Berger was presiding onstage before a white backdrop upon which poverty glowed in the kind of purple-pink lettering you might find outside a chic TriBeCa cafe. Poverty, of course, was an unfamiliar condition to those present, many of whom had paid a $15,000 registration fee to attend. At one point, one attendee whispered to an associate, "She has her own helicopter." A little cognitive dissonance didn't preclude some genuinely noble results. Clinton claims to have secured well over $1.25 billion in specific commitments from conference attendees to fund projects in the conference's four target areas. The pledges, written documents that Clinton required donors literally to sign "on the dotted line," ranged from $1 million (to improve the justice systems of Bolivia and Peru) to a promise by Michael Jordan's mother (for a hospital in Nairobi) to $1.5 million for "cheap sustainable mobility"--translation: free bicycles--for Sri Lankan tsunami survivors. (Some savvy observers insisted that Clinton's figure was inflated, saying certain "new" commitments were hyped-up extensions of preexisting programs. One attendee joked that some pledges read like little more than the sponsoring organizations' mission statements. But a Clinton spokesman told me that "every commitment" was "done specifically for ... or inspired by" the New York event.) Clinton constantly announced the latest dollar figure like a telethon host. But he appeared even more interested in the big ideas at play. Many of the conference's panels and "breakout sessions" seemed to accomplish little, producing either platitudes, such as Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal's pronouncement that "[w]e all value human life.... Let us work together on all these issues," or small-bore ideas like a proposal to print more Korans in Europe to promote religious understanding. Such moments led one reporter to call her editor in a mild panic. "It's just, like, so incredibly boring.... I feel like this is just a big waste of time." For Clinton, it was just the opposite. Partly, it was a chance to show off his astounding grasp of global affairs, whether it was the 15,000 job losses in "the little mountain kingdom of Lesotho" due to an expired trade pact; or grain production in Argentina and Brazil ("because they have topsoil, in some places as deep as 22 feet"); or the promise of solar energy ("There are a million homes in Latin America today where the light and cooking heat come from solar generators ... at a cost of about a month's worth of candles"). This, in sum, was a man who wanted to demonstrate total understanding of the planet Earth. And not just Earth--but also time, spirituality, and anything else you can imagine. In New York, Clinton sounded less like a politician and more like some mystical guru, an all-knowing caretaker of the planet. The first hint of this transformation came on the conference's opening day, when the former middle- class champion offered the politically taboo notion that, by forcing energy conservation and independence, higher oil prices are a good thing for the United States in the long term. Later, he mused about his mortality: "I've reached an age now where it doesn't matter what happens to me. I just don't want anyone to die before their time." Elsewhere, he riffed on the meaning of faith and religious harmony: "As long as you say, I believe there's a truth, but we're not in possession of it, we can all live together." And, perhaps most striking, in a discussion of climate change, Clinton cast the war on terrorism as a blip on the radar of history: "[W]e have become arrogant in the present. All of us. Osama bin Laden's arrogant in the present. I mean, he really thinks it matters if he blows us up and kicks a few thousand American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia or whatever. And we really think it matters if we blow him up, more than how we all live and how people will be living 100 years from now." It was a startling statement to hear so close to Ground Zero. Yet there seemed to be nary a critic in the house. After Clinton's closing remarks on Saturday afternoon--which featured a genuinely affecting sermon on aids in Africa--one man turned to the attendee next to him and declared, "He'd be elected president of the world if he were to run!" But Clinton is finished running. Mere mortals can never grant him the title he craves: messiah.