Book Signing To Biotech — Hillary Clinton Visits San Diego

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS Midday Edition, I am Maureen Cavanaugh. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked about biotech and much more at the BIO International Convention in San Diego. Here is a portion of her conversation with President and CEO of BIO, James Greenwood: [ AUDIO FILE PLAYING ] JIM GREENWOOD: On the domestic front, I think it is pretty hard to argue that we have a bigger problem than debt. With debt, you cannot do much else. You and I were talking backstage a bit, there were talks about a grand bargain, but partisanship is so strong that we get nowhere. If you are in the position to resolve that issue, where would you go? How do we get to yes on solving the financial crisis? HILLARY CLINTON: I think you have to start on rebuilding relationships and trying to establish a base of trust. We cannot get to any of these hard political choices. I wrote a book about hard choices, I think about them all the time here at home, and around the world. JIM GREENWOOD: Look, I have a copy right here. HILLARY CLINTON: Yes, there it is. [ LAUGHTER ] HILLARY CLINTON: You cannot get there to have the kind of discussion that we need unless you begin to rebuild relationships. I think that is number one in priorities. There was an interesting example of how this could work last fall, when the government shutdown, which was very unfortunate. Playing around with the idea of defaulting on debt. There was an agreement reached, and it required that two chairs of the budget committees, one in the house, when in the Senate, to actually come up with a budget. I think it was fortunate that the chair and the Senate, my friend, and the senator from Washington Patty Murray, and the chair from the house, Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, actually began to talk and listen to each other. If they had been given this assignment, to get a budget done, and they both showed up in a conference room with phalanxes of staff, big reading books and began to sort of make demands across the table, I don't know that it would have succeeded. Instead they did something very old-fashioned, Jim, they had meals together, they had long phone calls with a set of what you need and how far can you go, here is what I need and I cannot go further than that, and the two of them built up a level of trust so that when they came forth with a budget, which did not satisfy anybody, it was short turn to start with. But decisions were made that people on each side of the aisle were not happy with. It was what is essential in democracy, a thoughtful compromise to get us through a crisis. The response to it was quite remarkable. How did they do it, how did they make it happen? I think that is one lesson, and the other I would pull from my husband's presidency, you probably remember this. All during Bill's presidency a lot of very hard choices were made. On things like the budget, trying to move toward more fiscal responsibility, dealing with the government shutdown that happen not once, twice he never stopped talking to Newt Gingrich, who is the speaker then. I used to laugh because Newt would be on TV all day saying terrible things about Bill, and occasionally about me. And then around 9 o'clock at night, he would kind of sneak into the White House and they would start talking again. It got so bad, Jim will recognize this, that one of his lieutenants said one day we cannot let you meet with Bill Clinton alone. In fact it was Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. JIM GREENWOOD: I remember Newt came back to a Republican caucus, and he was talking about how charming Bill is, and he said I walk into his office and I sit down and start pounding on my knees, and he said after a few minutes my eyes start going like this and I take out my wallet and say how much would you like? [ LAUGHTER ] HILLARY CLINTON: There is no substitute for that personal contact, sometimes it starts off and I had this experience as a senator working on issues that were important to me, sometimes it starts off in a very hostile edition and if what you do is just hold your position and hurl return local arrows at the other person, you will not make any progress. You really have to dig into that relationship building, the same as I found when I was representing our country around the world. When you talk about something as big as the debt, where people are dug in, first of all, I think it is essential when you try to establish some basis for trust, you got to also establish a base of evidence. People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. You have to work to try to figure it out. You can see the same thing in the last can be half empty or half full but you at least have to say there is water in the class and where do we go from there? You know where the path has to be on both revenue and spending on entitlements. There are big ask it of challenges and I think it will take an enormous amount of personal effort, that is the only way it never works. You're going to have to have partners on the other side were willing to take risks with you and go out to defend what they have done. One of the biggest problems when you are in politics, is if you end up voting for or against something you should have made a well-informed enough vote at you feel confident defending it because even if people disagree with you, they will respect you for taking that position. What happens too often, if you get someone into making a politically risky vote, at the first time of trouble they run for cover and lose doubly. They lose on the substance of the vote, but they will lose even more because they have not stood their ground and defend the choice that they made. I think there is a lot of work that goes into trying to get to the discussion that you referred to about making these hard choices. JIM GREENWOOD: It is always harder to defend a political vote then a vote of conscience, you're right. Now I will ask you a personal question, I think I know something about you very few people know. Is it true that you were once a slimer? HILLARY CLINTON: Yes. Yes. I often say it is the job that I had that best prepared me for Washington. JIM GREENWOOD: Would you like to describe what a slimer is and does? HILLARY CLINTON: Yes, after I graduated from college, I was going to law school in the fall and I wanted a different experience. A group of friends and I drove to Alaska, going up the going up the Al-Can highway in the days before it was paved, camping out and taking odd jobs along the way. I washed dishes at Valdez near Denali National Park. It used to be called McKinley National Park one of the jobs I got was at a fishery. The salmon were brought in and thrown up on the dock, slid open and the caviar taken by expert workers from Japan, and they gave me a pair of hip boots and a spoon and my job was to clean out the inside of the fish. That is what a slimer did. Being be diligent as I had been through most of my life, I would take it, open it up, I would be cleaning it and they would be screaming at me in Japanese because I was not going fast enough. I tried to pick up the speed, clean the salmon out and then I get kicked upstairs because I was not fast enough. I was packing, and there was a primitive assembly line, and you are split the packet head to tail down the assembly line. I know nothing about salmon, so that was an experience on many different levels. JIM GREENWOOD: In your book you wrote climate change represents both a significant national security threat and a major test of American leadership. Many of our companies are in the biofuels business, a lot of it is directed to ethanol. We believe this the critical part of changing the greenhouse gas problem, reducing emissions, and yet as you know, once again, this pure political gridlock is very dug in with conservatives who are convinced this is all a hoax and the rest of us are truly worried for the habitability of the planet. For these people so talking with ideology, how do you deal with that? HILLARY CLINTON: First you have to separate those dug in ideologically from those who are taking advantage and feeling a debate for commercial and economic interests, those are not always the same. I think a lot of the confusion that exists in the public arena and even in the policymaking world, it is not scientifically-based, not ideological, it is sort of law politics that is fed by large financial interests who believe I think wrongly, who believe that the short-term cost to industry is greater than a long-term benefit that they, their family, or our world could receive. We have to do what President Obama is doing now, within his executive authority, he has to take steps as he recently did on the regulations for coal-fired plants. Recognizing that states are a different stages of development so if you are starting at a low base where you have not done very much to clean up the air, to deal with old plants, to come in with an alternative suite of energy products, then you have to do more but you have more time to do it if your state like California or Massachusetts that have been real leaders. Your burden then is different. Looking at the plan it is a good start on dealing with one continuing source of greenhouse gas emissions. All that is going on, we have direct challenges to alternatives coming from those who are politically opposed, they are trying to get states to do away with or refuse to renew credits for renewables, cooperative programs with utilities, so that if you have solar, wind, geothermal, utility buys it from you and puts it into the grid. There is a rearguard action. While we have not done enough to progress we have those behind us trying to undo what we have done. The irony is that we know that we can make a lot of progress in already established technology like when for example, there are a couple of states, Texas being one, in the top tier getting a significant percentage of electricity from wind. Everybody is acting in an almost political form of schizophrenia. They are doing some things that make it positive for us to deal with time and change, but they are also falling back into either bad habits of denial for political purposes or they are giving way to political and economic pressures. On this one too, I think that the recent proposal that Hank Paulson, former treasury secretary for George W. Bush, Mike Limburg, Tom Stier from here in California recently made about having business do the risk analysis and building it into your base, it is an important step that could raise the issues in a way that maybe would be harder for politicians to ignore. The insurance industry has run a lot of these risk analyses, they know very well on the east coast north of Virginia is in real peril. Therefore they are already talking with local governments, and big real estate holders on the East Coast from the Carolina's down to Miami about litigation. The more we can inject real life issues, problems, that are going to have to be addressed sooner instead of later while we're still trying to build a coalition that overpowers the ideological and check makes the political and economic opponents, the more we can try to move forward. It is imperative that we do, because the United States has to be seen as a leader here at home for us to influence what is going on globally. I have a chapter in the book about the Copenhagen conference that I attended that the present joined me at. It is around an instant that was so symbolic, because we're trying to get developing countries led by China and India to sign on to mitigation efforts, and they were taking a position that they did not have to do anything because they were still not developed enough and this was all the responsibility of the West. We had been making this case for a year, since I became secretary of state, and with my expert team, we wanted to get to some agreement, just a baby step, but something that would move that debate forward. We could not find the Chinese, or the Indians, or the South Africans, or the Brazilians. We had been told they had all left. The president and I looked at each other and said what do you mean they left? They could not have left. The conference is not over yet. And they sent out scouts, through this big convention center in Copenhagen, and said go find them, they have to be here somewhere. They found them hiding up the stairs in the back of one of the wings, holding a private meeting behind curtained windows. So, the president looks at me, I look at him, we go crash the meeting. It was the pedestrian equivalent of a motorcade, marching to the convention center up the stairs, Chinese guards are saying no, and we're saying hi. We are ducking under arms and around bodies, and finally we get to the door, and again, the arm is out and the president pushes through and I go under, and we say hi we have been looking for you. We sat down and began to talk. This is so critical that the United States be at every table, but we will not have any credibility, unless we are able to say we are taking some tough steps. We did some mileage work with cars, we are doing coal-fired plants, Supreme Court just thankfully upheld the right of administration to move forward on regulating greenhouse gases. There is not any international issue with longer a tail in terms of what we are addressing now. I think we have to keep at it, and there needs to be more of a sense of urgency and more conversations, and we have to get over this false equivalency. The press is not doing us any services, because you have 98% of the scientists in the world agreeing that man has caused much of this problem, and whenever the press covers it in most of the settings, they will have some of the who represents the overwhelming scientific opinion and then they will have somebody who basically says no, and they say that is the debate. That is not the debate, the debate is settled. What is not settled is what we're going to do about the debate, and whether we are going to take responsibility for our future.