So on Yahoo news just now there is this item about Anne Curry's interview with Bill Clinton:
"On Monday morning's Today Show, Ann Curry's interview with the former president - recorded over the weekend outside a Clinton Global Initiative event in Texas - addressed Clinton's inclusion on TIME's list of the "25 People to Blame" for the global economic collapse. "Oh no," he responded, "My question to them is: Do any of them seriously believe if I had been president, and my economic team had been in place the last eight years, that this would be happening today? I think they know the answer to that: No."
Let's talk about this below the fold.
This is an important question, since it speaks to the nature of the crisis itself, the forward-looking responsibilities of leadership, and our potentials for even extricating ourselves from this crisis with as little damage as possible.
I can't quibble with the economic achievements of the Clinton years. But that doesn't mean that those successes had no relationship to the subsequent excesses and the current crisis. As usual Bill, in my estimation, avoids the long view and any kind of responsibility for some of the tendencies that produced the problem in the first place. He was as much into deregulation as his Republican forebears. Furthermore, those in control then are in control now and, like Geithner, had a lot of involvement in the first TARP fiasco and that worries me.
I think it would be more helpful for us if leaders could talk about their actions with less defensiveness. Bill could move the issue along in the right direction by mentioning his role in and pressures toward deregulation when he was president.