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Madeleine Albright was here in Kutztown, PA to speak at Kutztown University on behalf of Hillary this morning on what seems like it was short notice.
Gorgeous spring day with the first flash of beaming yellow daffodils showing their pretty faces & flirty breezes with a hint of warmth. Pale blue sky tangled with clouds - almost a sense of Hope® or Change © in the air by the artist formerly known as spring ™... Plenty of news media about interviewing students before & after.
A very fractious, talkative crowd of about 200 housed in the nice, modern student union building with a good PA system. A nice mix of students and people from the wider community & looked fairly representative of the area & the students, started about a half hour later than stated.
Because of the students & the polarization a.k.a. "excitement" created by these two candidates being the last two standing, it was a talkative, loud & opinionated crowd, more like a crowd for a sports event than a talk/lecture. Plenty of O! supporters in the student body & but visible t-shirts, buttons etc. from both camps. One guy had on a dual O! H t-shirt that said BROES BEFORE HOES, like in the brilliant Mad as Hell video (HEY! I report, you decide! Gotta give props to any culture that contributes calling women Hoes continuously!- how progressive is that?!) He also happened to be African American- or perhaps a student from an altogether different country, we didn't speak, so I don't really know.
From the comments overheard section: one very Hillary friendly fella was sitting behind me telling for some bizarre reason very loud Monica Lewinsky jokes. He was also among the first to leap to his feet & dash to the volunteer to canvas for Hillary booth afterwards- I think he was just one of those daring "hams" but given the context it was getting nervewracking. I overheard several people say they were undecided.
Unfortunately before the set-up people had to move a mobile wall to make more room for additional people, a group of three young college-aged men who I must conclude were the token & probably official College Republicans were talking purposefully loudly saying over & over again, "How many times do you get to vote for your enemy's enemy & take them out too? HAHAHAHAHAHA" over & over again, discussing their cross-registration voting plan. Not very subtle. I was in an extremely fighting mood so decided to keep my mouth shut since it would have come across like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, heh. They seemed to disappear once the event started & there was also another scattered group of kids who just seemed friendly, but not coordinated in any special way, who were threatening to ask some kind of questions they believed to be controversial.
I told one loudmouth in front of me that you can't run the country on a speech, started a good conversation with one of the kids who seemed to be threatening to ask a "controversial" question (like Maddy Albright hasn't walked through fire in her life & a question from a kid is going to throw her for a loop!) & then...
In she walks. Yes, she really is as petite as the box placed in front of the podium suggested, & upon which the local Dem Students for Hillary group leader, whose first name is Arnica, decided to crouch upon during her introduction. Great, fun, respectful & breathless intro.
Madeleine Albright stepped to the podium to a rousing standing ovation & warm, receptive welcome. She looked like a million bucks & was wearing a black Chanel flavored suit jacket with gold trim detail with a structured black double hemmed skirt. She winkingly showed us a little leg later in her talk while she described the sexism she has faced & the disparity she has noticed in the press coverage of this race. Now, here is someone who knows a thing or a thousand about how a woman in the political arena's superficial qualities like hair & the length of her skirt seem to matter inordinately in some quarters- so she showed us some leg, to a great round of appreciative applause & knowing nods.
She is a firecracker! I could have listened to her for a week. She had come from an appearance last night on The Colbert Report - this link might float - - which I haven't seen yet.
Anyway- she instantly won over the audience with a funny story of traveling back from China with Chicago being the first stop that allowed her to weave in her bona fides & set the stage for her five point presentation. She rolled out five major points for discussion & expanded on each as only a seasoned diplomat as she could in such a short space of time. Definitely a command performance.
She stated emphatically that the next POTUS faces an incredible mess & unprecedented post-Bush clean up.
1. How to fight terrorism without breeding more terrorists/terrorism.
2. Nuclear non-proliferation system is now broken
3. Here- she used WKC's well worn (to Clarkies) line that - No one ever comes to her & says they want their country to look like Iraq.
4. Was fussing with my camera here, sorry. She spent some time here discussing all of the complicated tinderbox of elements surrounding & inside Pakistan- here is where she used the terms "international migraine."
5. Dealing with unintended consequences (of previous decisions.
Then she said something that of course, stopped the breath of the room for a moment, simply because it is an enormous thing to say.
That she feels in no uncertain terms that Iraq will go down in history as the single greatest strategic blunder in US history, including Vietnam. Of course she immediately added that she obviously did not mean this in the sense of number of casualties or wounded on either side of that conflict, and not to lessen anything or take away from those who were touched by it. But, in terms of unintended consequences for the future, the mess in Iraq as it touches other Gulf states (she didn't say this) has simply resulted in immeasurable waves of unintended consequences, from being unable to act in other situations to X, Y, Z, you name it.
That w has practiced a form of not only unilateral, but unidimensional FP. She then circled the globe, naming several hotspots we have neglected in these years. She said people want to vote & eat, and that Venezuela had previously been ruled by old men who were out of touch, so, for example, she understands how Hugo Chavez may hold some appeal to the people.
She talked a lot about how she traveled personally with Hillary to over 80 different countries & registered her dismay at how these experiences have been brushed aside by the press as "just women talking." She stressed that working with women's groups was a deliberate strategy on the part of Clinton I because they knew without a doubt that societies that treat women as equals have better health care, are more stable, have stronger rule of law & when women are lifted up, so are we all.
She spoke extensively about how she saw firsthand Hillary deliver some tough messages in very hostile rooms, whether it be China or Czechoslovakia. Albright also spoke about the nature of making connections between foreign & domestic policy, seeing how they fit together in that butterfly flaps its wing kind of way, about seeing things in their totality. It's about understanding connections.
She stressed that she has always liked what she saw in Hillary, whose alma mater she shares though Albright is ten years older than Hillary, in the sense of being a great student. The student to ask questions, the student to insist on follow-up, the one who wants to know more.
She opened the floor for questions. The first was from a young man who brought us back to an early debate when Hillary & O! were asked whether or not they would meet with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions in the first year. Albright was appreciative of Hillary's exposure to diplomatic protocols here, and went into great details, artfully explaining that a meeting with the President in such cases is generally reserved for breakthroughs, accords or major major developments. And she told the story of how North Korea presented Bill Clinton an ornate invitation to sit down & it was rebuffed & instead, she was sent. While they weren't exactly thrilled to see her, the lesson was crystal clear. And the administration retained the upper hand by doing so. The President is the trump card, she said, over & over. And you don't start by playing trump! Hillary understands this because she has been exposed to the protocols & had master teachers.
There were a few more questions but I'll end on the one asked by my friend who had been threatening to ask a controversial question. This one is especially "funny" (not that anything about what happened in Rwanda was funny) to me because when I first sat down, we had a light exchange where he mumbled something about Rwanda- and I said- I'm not sure what happened, I think we had troops on the ground in Bosnia plus right before Rwanda, there was Somalia & Black Hawk down. The President didn't have the political capital to do anything, plus Bosnia. I think everyone regrets what happened pretty deeply.
So I was so grateful that he got to ask his question, because to an extent, I'd been on the right track. I was relieved, in fact, when he asked his question because he's a secondary ed major & said that his sister held up Maddy Albright as a role model for years & was just in the process of finishing up her own doctorate at Yale in international studies- so I was a lot more relaxed by the time he got around to asking his question.
First of all, she said, tell your sister not to take as long finishing her doctorate as I did! I started when my twin girls (she's a mother of 3) were babies & didn't end until they were in middle school- and they would threaten me that if I didn't do my homework, they didn't have to do theirs!!
And obviously Rwanda was a tragedy & everyone should have done more, particularly the US, but also the UN as well. In fact she squeezed a great mini-history of the UN emerging from the Cold War & coming into it's own, a bit of a new dawn in the Clinton era, and an institution they had decided to support & provide resources to. Prior to that I think she said it had forces of about 80,000 peacekeepers worldwide & operated like a "9-5 business, open only Monday - Friday!" (Hope I don't have the number of personnel wrong). Anyway she spent quite some time in explaining the context of Rwanda & also that the UN in general was unprepared for what she termed "volcanic genocide" which erupts suddenly, as opposed to something like what is happening today, this very day, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo & in Darfur (for which why we are not doing more, there is no legitimate reason that she can see). There also was a lot less information- in retrospect, and in hindsight, and because of the enormity of what happened, now, there is a lot of research, analysis, information but at the time there was very little to go on. She didn't present this as an excuse- any of it, just trying to recreate the circumstances for people.
Also she said she has stayed up many many nights, read extensively, researching, analyzing, asking questions & came to a novel & somewhat startling conclusion in that in her opinion, she believes it may be the case that blame for Somalia & blame for Rwanda have been flip flopped in that the US may be more responsible for Somalia, not the UN, because we did not send enough troops to complete the mission. And in Rwanda, the UN had more coverage, more leverage & more information & did not act. Again, this was not presented as an excuse but rather by someone seeking answers in order to not have anything similar happen again, because these failures are the collective failures of humanity.
I also felt like there was a lot of rich territory in her remarks, more towards the beginning, about what happened as the Cold War wound down, how our intelligence agencies were calibrated for the wrong "fights."
She did also, more towards the start, touch a bit on Iraq but mostly in the sense that Iran is really the beneficiary of w's horrific FP blunders.
She said she feels the excitement in the primary is good for the Democratic Party & she really didn't mention the other candidate whatsoever.
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