Bill Clinton charmed crowds in Southern Africa this week, mingling with barefooted children and joking with Malawians — showing the diplomatic skills he could put to use if his wife becomes America’s first woman president.
Hillary Clinton has said she would make her husband a roaming ambassador, using his talent to repair America’s tattered image abroad.
Guests at a function Bill Clinton attended on Thursday in Johannesburg for former South African President Nelson Mandela’s birthday wanted to know if he was ready for a role reversal.
”You bet!” Bill Clinton said, sitting next to a chuckling Mandela.
The former United States president said he hoped he would not have to give up his Clinton Foundation work on HIV/Aids, malaria and climate change if his wife were to win the White House. His current trip includes visits to a soccer youth outreach programme in Zambia and a remote village in Malawi.
He demonstrated his popular touch on Friday after listening to a Malawian farmer discussing problems facing subsistence peasants in a country regularly battered by drought.
”Where I come from I grew up on a farm,” he said, ”and when a farmer speaks as well as you have done, he quits and joins politics.”
Clinton travelled to the dusty southern village of Neno with his philanthropic partner Tom Hunter, a Scottish billionaire, to check on progress in setting up ”rural growth centres,” where facilities such as a hospital, banks and markets would be constructed.
There are no proper roads in Neno, and running water is scarce.
Electricity arrived only recently, but televisions are still a rarity.
Even so, most locals had heard of Clinton before his visit.
There was more uncertainty over his wife.
When asked his opinion about Hillary Clinton running for office, carpenter Tapuwa Shiri said: ”For which country?”
He then turned his attention back to Bill. ”I wish he’d run for office here because with his wealth all of us can be rich. We can start using dollars.”
Bill Clinton has used his prestige and contacts to negotiate lower prices on lifesaving Aids drugs in Africa, with projects that reach three-quarters of a million people. He also has worked with former US president George HW Bush in raising funds for victims of the 2004 tsunami.
If Hillary Clinton is elected president, employing her husband as a roving ambassador would be smart in terms in foreign policy — and also in terms of establishing her own authority within the White House, said Theodore Lowi, a professor of US government at Cornell University who has written extensively on the presidency.
Amid an unpopular US-led war in Iraq, the US’s image continues to sag virtually worldwide except on the world’s poorest continent. A recent survey found that in several African nations, America was more popular than among Americans.
In Zambia, Clinton enjoys rock star-like status.
”He is held in very high esteem in this country,” said Elizabeth Mataka, an HIV/Aids activist recently appointed as the UN’s special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa.
‘Singularly directionless’
While positive about a possible ”Billary” presidency, Richard Cornwell of the Pretoria-based Institute for Strategic Studies said Bill Clinton’s presidential legacy on the continent was worth studying.
”I don’t think Africa really occupied a massive part on his global scheme,” he said, saying Bill Clinton’s Sudan policy was ”singularly directionless” and noting that he apologised for moving too slowly to stop the Rwandan genocide.
South Africans also were curious about the possibility of his wife running on a joint ticket with her main Democratic Party rival, Barrack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and who was met with great excitement when he traveled through Kenya, South Africa and four other African countries last year.
”It would be foolish for Hillary, or, frankly, for any of the others running to contemplate who their vice-president’s going to be. We’ve got a race to win first,” Bill Clinton said, referring to the Democratic primary election. ”Then I will entertain such questions, if I am asked. And if I am not asked I will keep my thoughts to myself.”
Demure, respectful and discreet, as first spouses are expected to be.
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian of the US’s first ladies, believes that without anyone paying much attention, Bill Clinton has been playing such a role in public and providing insight into what his potential tenure as ”First Gent” would be like.
Anthony points out that, while the US has yet to elect a woman president, other countries have had women presidents and prime ministers. But the men who have pioneered the first spouse role were not themselves former presidents.
Certainly Bill Clinton is no Pertti Arajarvi, the husband of Finnish President Tarja Halonen, who is seen as a rather colourless civil servant. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s husband, Joachim Sauer, is so averse to public appearances he stayed at home and watched her swearing-in on television. The late Denis Thatcher, husband of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, once described himself as the most ”shadowy husband of all time”.
In the historic event of Hillary Clinton entering the White House, to refer to the Clintons as the ”presidential couple” would be doubly accurate. But the dilemma remains of how one would address any future male ”first lady” of America.
First Lad sounds too English. There is first husband, the nondescript first spouse or the more politically correct presidential spouse and the utterly awful presidential partner.
Jakes Gerwel, chair of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, did not hesitate when he thanked Bill Clinton at the end of Thursday’s event, saying: ”I look forward to seeing you as the first gentleman in the White House.” – Sapa-AP