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For Democrats, library a place to raise voices
Thu Nov 18, 6:24 AM ET
By Bill Nichols and Richard Benedetto, USA TODAY
Weeks don't get much better if you are William Jefferson Clinton. For the third time in 12 eventful years, this proud Southern city is bedecked with bunting and banners to welcome the world, this time for today's opening of Clinton's $165 million presidential library.

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Thirty thousand visitors are expected, the beginning of what Little Rock leaders hope will be decades and millions of dollars of economic benefits. (Related graphic: Tour the library)
Clinton's friends of a lifetime are here. Staffers from two turbulent terms have trekked south for an emotional class reunion. "For a lot of us, we didn't just form a political bond," says Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel (news, bio, voting record) of Illinois, who was a White House adviser. "There are lifelong friendships here. This is something to be joyful about."
But with Bill Clinton (news - web sites), nothing, even joy, is simple. Amid all the festivities, participants are mindful that John Kerry (news - web sites)'s defeat two weeks ago has created a dark night of the soul for the Democratic Party. And many Democrats are looking to Clinton and the gathering of the Clintonista tribe to herald a new dawn with the centrist "third way" politics that won him the White House.
"The dedication comes at the perfect time," former chief of staff Leon Panetta says. "Democrats need to think about what it was that Bill Clinton did to get elected president and re-elected to a second term."
What was to have been an elegiac look back has become something closer to a pep rally and encounter session for Democrats yearning to recapture the Clinton magic in a bottle and unseal it just in time for the 2008 presidential race, perhaps even with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) as the party's standard-bearer.
"I'm tired of looking at maps of red and blue states," the former president said Tuesday in a speech at Little Rock's Central High School. Federal troops had to be used to integrate Central in 1957. "I'm tired of being told that there is more that divides us than unites us," said Clinton, feisty but still thin and fatigued from his heart bypass two months ago.
Right after President Bush (news - web sites) defeated Kerry, many old Clinton hands feared that this celebration would be a wake. If anything, the opposite appeared to be true as Clinton raced from event to event as if campaigning, even though aides say he tires easily and sometimes avoids the crowded parties he has always thrived on.
"He's not one to sit around and whine about the results of elections," former press secretary Jake Siewert says. "There have been very few moments in Clinton's history that have been funereal."
There is nothing but local pride over today's unveiling of the Clinton library on a 30-acre site on the banks of the Arkansas River. Already it has helped transform downtown Little Rock, which was an assortment of a few hotels, aging department stores and vacant storefronts when Clinton ran for president in 1992. Now, some of those vacant storefronts are art galleries, gift shops and chic restaurants.
Officials say the library, the 13th such presidential site, has brought more than $1 billion in development since Clinton announced the project in 1997.
"I thought I owed it to my native state," Clinton said of basing his library here. He lives in New York. "I wanted to make a contribution to the development of this city that I love so much," he told the Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites) on Tuesday.
In addition to gaining a tourist magnet, city administrators expect the area to gain prestige from activities surrounding Clinton's presidential foundation, which will have an office at the library, and the Clinton School of Public Service, an arm of the University of Arkansas. The school will offer a master's degree in public service. Clinton friend and former Arkansas senator David Pryor is the first dean.
Clinton has spent the past four years beginning the work of his presidential foundation, which deals with issues such as global HIV (news - web sites)-AIDS (news - web sites), and finally paying off his legal bills with fees from speeches and a best-selling memoir, My Life. Now he promises to spend more time in Arkansas. The library's third floor has a 2,000-square-foot two-bedroom apartment.
Tucked into a first-floor corner is an exhibit on Clinton's impeachment. It calls the investigation into his financial dealings "The Politics of Persecution." The probe expanded into other areas, including his involvement with Monica Lewinsky, the exhibit says. "Clinton acknowledged that he had not been forthcoming about the relationship," it says.
The biggest thing on display is a bulletproof black Cadillac limousine used by Clinton. Next to it is a video saluting the Secret Service. The second floor highlight is a full-size replica of Clinton's Oval Office.
Today's opening will be a presidential spectacle. Bush will attend with two former presidents: his father and Jimmy Carter. Gerald Ford, at 91, doesn't travel much, his office said. Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, will perform, as will the band's guitarist, The Edge. Former South African president Nelson Mandela will send greetings by videotape.
Clinton staffers and Democratic brethren began arriving Tuesday - a chartered jet of former aides landed Wednesday - for a rolling party through tonight. Many voice a greater need: a renewed vision for the party that Clinton transformed in the wake of similarly devastating presidential defeats in 1980, 1984 and 1988.
"No question there will be a lot of discussion about what went right and what went wrong in the 2004 election," says David Leavy, National Security Council spokesman in Clinton's second term. "It's clear for many of us ex-Clinton officials that taking the best ideas from the left and from the right in order to chart a third way in American politics that defies easy labeling is the right formula for good governance - but also for successful electoral politics."
In Clintonism, that means fiscal conservatism, hawkish defense policies, centrist solutions for divisive social issues such as abortion and gay rights and an unrelenting focus on programs to improve the economic well-being of average Americans.
"We need to bring the party back to the modern era," says John Podesta, who was a Clinton White House chief of staff. "Clinton was a guy who believed that ideas counted, and the library opening will be a reminder of that."
Bruce Reed, who was White House domestic policy adviser and now heads the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, agrees. "The Democratic Party has a lot to learn from Bill Clinton and his success," Reed says. "He carried a dozen red states in 1992 and 1996. ... His approach is the only winning formula Democrats have had in the last 30 years."
In the fractious Democratic Party, there will be dissenting views about what road to take to 2008 and beyond. Many Democrats warn now - and warned when Clinton was president - that the party cannot forget its roots as a populist champion of the underprivileged, of equal rights and social progressivism. During his failed presidential bid, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (news - web sites) referred to those holding on to those associations as the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
There also is the subject of Hillary Clinton (news - web sites). Most polls find the New York senator to be the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. She is keeping a studiously low profile for the events surrounding the library's opening, but virtually everyone close to the Clintons believes she is considering a run.
That candidacy would undoubtedly reflect Bill Clinton's moderate approach to governing, but many Republicans believe Hillary Clinton, as another senator from a Northeastern state who has a well-documented history of 1960s protest politics, would provide a rerun of the 2004 race.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the national Republican chairman during Clinton's first six years in the White House, says the Clinton brand was exposed as traditional liberalism in his first term, then rescued by achievements largely after Republicans captured Congress in 1994.
"I am sure it will be a very nice tribute," Barbour said of today's events. "But I can't see it producing anything for the Democratic Party to rally around. Looking at the Kerry campaign, it looked like the Clinton people took it over. If there was a lesson in doing things the Clinton way, Kerry would have won."
The Clinton faithful acknowledge that his success may have stemmed from his once-in-a-generation political skills as much as his policy framework.
But these Democrats know that with Clinton, they had success. And they want it again.
It's simple, the old master kept saying here this week: Just add some liberal touches with a dash of conservative seasoning.
At the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Clinton spoke of his love of the architectural flourishes of the 150,000-square-foot library complex - and complained that a British magazine had mocked it as a glorified house trailer.
"I guess that's just me," Clinton said. "A little bit of red and a little bit of blue."
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