September 28, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
PRESS CLIPPINGS
Bill Clinton’s foundation is the center of attention in two of the nation’s major magazines: Fortune and The New Yorker both made his philanthropic work the centerpiece of their September 18 issues.
Both of the articles emphasize that the foundation accomplishes more than its $30-million budget would seem capable of achieving.
Fortune says the foundation decides its priorities based on what interests Mr. Clinton. “With another boss this might be limiting,” the magazine says, “but it works with Clinton because his range is so broad and deep: global poverty, climate change, obesity, HIV/AIDS.”
The next step is to ask whether the organization can make a difference to a cause and if anyone else is doing a better job of pursuing a particular problem or need.
Sometimes the foundation will decide it’s not needed — for example, it rejected pleas to get involved in fixing water and sanitation problems because it didn’t have the resources, Fortune says — but in other cases it discovers that a successful effort would benefit by collaborating with Clinton’s organization to get more attention.
“We’ll work with anyone,” Mr. Clinton tells the magazine.
While Mr. Clinton didn’t have his own personal wealth to create the foundation, he is able to attract plenty of people to support his work, The New Yorker says, noting he is the “first post-president to tap into the newer generation of the wealthy — the hedge-fund and retail moguls who have bigger planes to lend and more cash to burn than their upper-class predecessors ever had.”
“Clinton’s appeal to such tycoons is obvious: in exchange for giving money to a good cause, you not only have the usual tax break and the knowledge that you are doing good,” the article says. The donors get to go on trips with “an ex-president who knows how to have good time,” and “you become a certified friend of Bill, which still has some currency six years after one Clinton White House and, possibly, two years before another. Writing a check to the March of Dimes hardly provides the same multi-layered reward.”
The Fortune article is available online. An interview with the author of the New Yorker article is available on that magazine’s Web site.
