For Clinton, a Chance to Evoke Better Days

With President Bush wallowing in low public esteem, his predecessor came to town yesterday for a bit of gloating.

It wasn't the overt, I-told-you-so gloat; that would be unseemly for a former president. But as Bill Clinton accepted an award for "international understanding" and addressed a group of nonprofits yesterday, his words carried the subtle but unmistakable pleasure of sua culpa .

Noting the plummeting image of the United States in the Muslim world -- except in Indonesia, where Clinton himself has been helping with tsunami relief -- he said that "it's a big argument for doing things in a cooperative way rather than in a unilateral way."

Mocking the Bush administration policy of "cooperate when there's no other alternative," he added: "We should still have a preference for peace over war, a preference for cooperation over unilateralism, a preference for investing more to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists."

The 43rd president is a fairly easy target for the 42nd at the moment. At 38 percent support in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, Bush has been lower longer than Clinton ever was.

But Clinton is also auditioning for two quite different honors: following Jimmy Carter to Stockholm as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and following Hillary Clinton to the White House as the first first gentleman.

In pursuit of the former, he has been a paragon of good works. "I believe there will be less corruption as there is more capacity in the developing world," he found himself telling the nonprofits yesterday in a speech steeped in the vocabulary of nongovernmental organizations. "It's not a particularly sexy topic," he admitted, "but I've already had enough headlines to last me." When the laughter quieted, he added: "I like boring. Boring is good."

His wife was not in the audience for either event, but he mentioned the potential political balance he offers her at the state fair. "I know one end of a cow from another," he boasted.

The Clinton style of old was in evidence yesterday. He carried a text to both appearances but barely glanced at either, at times meandering on tangents that diluted his points. And he was hopelessly late. He was 22 minutes late to the International Monetary Fund, where he was the guest of honor at the Fulbright Association's award ceremony. "Good morning, I think," joked former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, when she finally got to give her speech.

Next, he was an hour late to speak to the charity officials at InterAction, giving his luncheon speech long after the last apple pie was consumed. After half an hour of waiting, former UNICEF director Carol Bellamy headed for the exits. "It was a great speech," she deadpanned at the press table.

No matter: Clinton was among friends. "We miss you!" an audience member cried out after a boisterous reception at InterAction. At the IMF, staffers waited outside the room and leaned over balconies to get a glimpse of him.

The Fulbright itself, honoring international understanding, had many components Bush might find distasteful. Past recipients include Carter, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, two other U.N. officials and Bush's loyal first-term dissenter, Colin Powell. A videotaped greeting to "Bill" from Annan -- no friend of the current president -- called him "a true visionary."

Clinton did not level criticism directly; he merely suggested what he thought the legendary J. William Fulbright, the former senator from Arkansas and a Clinton mentor, would have thought of the current situation. Fulbright, who died in 1995, was in no position to argue.

Fulbright, Clinton said, "essentially thought that a country had to have a military but there were limits to what you could achieve militarily. And he believed that over the long run the gains we achieved through reasonable conversation . . . are those that are the most lasting."

The former president offered Indonesia as proof of this conviction, and, in true Clinton fashion, he cited opinion polls. "Approval of bin Laden had gone from 58 percent to 28 percent," he said. Why? "They saw the military dropping food instead of bombs."

Clinton said Fulbright would side with him (against Bush) in support of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto accord and the use of "soft power." He derided criticism, frequently voiced by the current administration, that "if I didn't take military action this very day, people would look down their nose at America and think we were weak." To that, Clinton said, he always posed a question: "Can we kill him tomorrow? If we can kill him tomorrow, then we're not weak."

Clinton knew there was a danger of getting carried away. "When I left the White House, I was determined that I would not spend the rest of my life wishing I was still president," he recalled. But he didn't rule out the possibility of an occasional gloat.