The Aspen Ideas Festival - notes from an attendee (Clinton & more)

The Imperial City
Centrist Mountain Time
At the Aspen Institute’s glitzy-wonky summer camp last week, conservatives sounded like liberals, and vice versa. How bracing.


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we attended a festival of ideas, the name suggesting a kind of blithe intellectual gambol at the foot of Mt. Olympus, thus compensating for the fact that the topics and themes of the roundtables and speeches here tended toward the tough-minded and even grisly—Islamic terrorism, Iraqi civil war, biotechnological hubris, global warming, the impotence of liberals.

But that doesn’t mean the thing was a bummer. Quite the contrary. The sun shone, the nights were cool, and the VIP-room juice was at full strength. There were intelligent and funny conservatives (David Brooks, Ted Olson), eminent presidential counselors (Arthur Schlesinger, Dave Gergen), coulda-shoulda-wannabe presidents (Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, Wesley Clark), charismatic bad-boy curmudgeons (Larry Summers, Bill Bennett), African-American royalty (Toni Morrison, Stephen Carter), technology zillionaires (Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, John Doerr), and a quorum of A-list Washington journalists (Peter Beinart, Jim Lehrer, Chris Matthews, Steve and Cokie Roberts). Even some of the ordinary audience members—Ed Bradley, Michael Kinsley—were media celebrities.

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There was lots of humor, only some of it wonky (e.g., Colin Powell on Canadian textile trade disputes). The best jokes, apparently not by prearrangement, concerned one’s own well-known scandal. When Summers, during his stage appearance with Chris Matthews, referred approvingly to the flood of women into the labor force, he preemptively interjected, “Spare me the wisecrack, Chris.” During another discussion, when one panelist used the phrase “let the chips fall,” Bill Bennett cracked, “Don’t say ‘chips’ around me.” And when the week’s surprise guest and ultimate BMOC, Bill Clinton, showed up on Friday for a one-on-one with Walter, he paused halfway through a story about a Pentecostal-minister friend’s “confessing” his vote for Bush last fall. “The world’s most famous sinner,” Clinton said, “and I got a preacher confessing to me.”

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I neither loved nor hated Clinton when he was in office, but I have to say, watching him onstage in Aspen, I was, like the rest of the audience, staggered by his display of the virtues his successor so manifestly lacks—detailed knowledge, lucidity, intellectual agility, easy humor, comfort in his own skin.

Is it corny or pointless to wish we had a president like that? Or like Colin Powell? They are wise men.

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/columns/imperialcity/12266/index.html

could just regular people get tickets for that? What a summer camp that must have been.

Here's a link to the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival page. There's a link there to be put on their mailing list for the 2006 festival.


http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003086.html

:)