What to Make of the Clinton Global Initiative?

Waves of luminaries descended on the second annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative the end of last week in New York. On the one hand, it looks like a cult of personality, or perhaps of multiple personalities, in the sense of lots of very important people coming together to bask in each other’s reflected glory. Check out the rather breathless blogging from the meeting, replete with dramatic moments as Clinton and others make their appearances before adoring crowds (one didn’t have to be famous to get in – anyone willing to shell out $15,000 could join in the fun). As Tom Brokaw says at the beginning of one panel on which he sat with Colin Powell and Rupert Murdoch: “if you believe, as I do, that life is like high school, then this is a pretty good cafeteria table to be sitting at.” That makes it look pretty trivial, in the way of a celebrity social gathering.

On the other hand, unlike a social gathering (or, rather, perhaps like a mega-charity ball) the bottom line is pretty impressive, with more than $7 billion in “commitments” in such areas as sustainable energy, global health, and poverty alleviation. That’s more than twice as much as such countries as Spain, Canada, and Sweden spent on foreign assistance in 2005 (though the CGI pledges will presumably in many cases be spread out on a multi-year basis), and one might expect that because they’re coming out of private sources that they get more bang for the buck.

And of course there was probably a lot of serious policy-oriented business taken care of here as well (as of course would also be true at the similar Davos meetings). Clinton himself dropped a hint that he was privy to some sort of Mideast peacemaking on his turf. (Hat tip: Foreign Poicy’s Passport.) That can’t be a bad thing, either – these privately-hosted meetings aren’t weighed down by the sort of protocol requirements of something like the UN General Assembly (to which the CGI annual meeting runs parallel, so that heads of state and other high government officals can pop across midtown and be included in the list of “featured attendees”). No rules of sovereign equality need apply. So the CGI and other such undertakings are perhaps a welcome end-run around the inefficiencies of public institutions, or at least some form of competition for them.

The best thing going for the CGI is its larger-than-life sponsor (who is aggressively non-partisan in this undertaking, extending a lead role to Laura Bush at last week’s meeting). One might wonder if he is also its greatest liability, as demonstrated by the distraction of the Chris Wallace interview, in which CGI got just a little bit lost in the scuffle.