Opening of Bill Clinton’s library: a sordid gathering of the “fat cats”

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On hand for the overblown festivities in Little Rock were the present occupant of the White House, George W. Bush; former presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter; former vice president Al Gore; the defeated Democratic candidate for president, John Kerry; and countless other luminaries of the American political scene. They chatted and chummed it up for the cameras, going out of their way to praise one another and present a picture of unity and cordiality.
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Clinton returned to the theme time and again: “I once said to a friend of mine about three days before the election—and I heard all these terrible things. I said, ‘You know, am I the only person in the entire United States of America who likes both George Bush and John Kerry, who believes they’re both good people, who believe they both love our country and they just see the world differently?’ What should our shared values be? Everybody counts. Everybody deserves a chance. Everybody has got a responsibility to fulfill. We all do better when we work together. Our differences do matter but our common humanity matters more.”

This is all hogwash. Clinton may imagine that he can dissolve the political conflicts with his banal phrasemaking, but this only reveals the extent to which he and the rest of the Democrats and Republicans are unaware of the forces driving the divisions in the US—above all, the vast social polarization—and the consequences of their own right-wing policies.

In reality, Clinton, a self-proclaimed member of “the top one percent,” Bush, Kerry, Gore and the rest of the leading lights on hand in Little Rock are representatives of the financial oligarchy that thoroughly dominates American life. It is not so much “common humanity” that binds Clinton, Bush and the rest together as their “common” (and vast) wealth. Karl Marx, at his most deterministic, could hardly have imagined a crowd of politicians so conscious of their own immediate, material, class interests as the gathering in Little Rock.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/clin-n20.shtml