Bill Clinton: Networks Will Dominate This Century

The concept of networking “is going to dominate the 21st century,” former President Bill Clinton told attendees at the opening of the Southern Governors’ Association’s annual meeting, which is being held in Little Rock this weekend.

The theme of the conference is “Lab to Market: Accelerating the American South’s R&D Network.” In a wide-ranging speech that was long on policy and short on politics, Clinton touched on the idea of networking in areas as diverse as the computer simulation industry in Orlando and the political situation in Iraq.

“The next four years, you mark my words about this, are going to be dominated by an attempt to define the terms of our interdependence,” he said.

He said places where people effectively network thrive, while areas where they don’t suffer.

“Every place in America, every place in the world there are positive networks and cooperation, good things are happening,” he said. “Everywhere in the world people spend all their time fighting and trying to get a bigger piece of a smaller pie, good things are not happening. This is not rocket science.”

The audience included three well-known members of Clinton’s administration: former Chief of Staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, former Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater, and Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme allied commander.

The audience did not include many Southern governors. Apart from Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, who is chairman of the SGA, the only other governor of a U.S. state attending Clinton’s speech was Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear. Clinton began his speech by mentioning a recent Gallup survey showing that Arkansas ranks first in the country in its improvement in the percentage of uninsured residents, and Kentucky ranks second.

“In both cases, we had practical solutions to a genuine challenge,” he said.

The governors of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were also present. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley was expected to arrive later.

Clinton said that, as governor, he had spearheaded efforts to transform the state’s technical schools into community colleges. However, he said, many of those colleges now think of themselves as feeder schools for four-year schools “instead of connectors to the private economy.”

“We still have that and we still have now what I think is no longer a sustainable division in our own mind between what is academic and what is practical, between the vocational and the academic,” he said.

Clinton spoke about the University of Arkansas System’s online eVersity, which offers classes in six-week time periods instead of over a semester. That makes it easier for the many Arkansans who have some college but no degree to take classes one at a time.

“If you could get every person in the United States who has already spent some time in an institution of higher education into a user-friendly, affordable way of completing a degree relevant to the emerging economy, it would have a dramatic impact on our capacity to grow, to reduce income inequality, and to recreate traditions of shared prosperity,” he said.

Doing that would require a network, he said.

Clinton closed his speech by describing the book, “Plain Talk,” by the late Ken Iverson, former head of Nucor Steel. Iverson wrote about the need to pay employees well and worry less about quarterly shareholder returns. During the story, Clinton acknowledged in the audience John Correnti, a former Nucor executive who now is head of Big River Steel, which is building a steel mill in Blytheville to compete with Nucor.

Clinton said Iverson probably was a conservative Republican who never voted for him. However, he said Iverson was “my sort of a conservative Republican” because he was a “communitarian, a networker, a cooperator. There’s more than one way to skin the cat that America faces today, but there is no way to avoid the need for the network, for shared responsibility, shared decision making, shared benefits.”

BEEBE FIELDS QUESTIONS
After the Clinton speech, Gov. Mike Beebe spoke with reporters.

Beebe said he would tell other governors attending the SGA conference who did not expand Medicaid, “Thanks for helping pay for our people.”

Beebe made the comment in response to a reporter’s question during a press conference prior to the start of the Southern Governors Association’s annual meeting in Little Rock Friday. Unlike many states, Arkansas expanded its Medicaid rolls as part of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. However, unlike some other states, it did so by using those dollars to pay for private insurance for lower-income Arkansans through a program often called the Private Option.

“This is not going to be a pejorative conference, so I’m not going to jump on any other governors for their own decisions. For us, it was the right thing to do,” he said.

Arkansas’ health care policies will be discussed during a panel discussion Saturday morning at the Marriott Hotel.

Beebe, who is chairman of the SGA until after the annual meeting, said the SGA allows states to share ideas and lessons learned. It also allows them to work together to practice “collective influence” while working with Washington.

“Governors, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, face the same problems and usually see eye to eye on most issues,” he said.