Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t directly mention San Diego after walking onto a downtown stage Tuesday morning.
But the former president and one-time secretary of state did say one of the region’s biggest debates wasn’t truly intractable.
“We could solve our border problems tomorrow,” Hillary Clinton argued, referring to the large numbers of people regularly seeking to cross over from Mexico. The federal government just needed to boost its manpower and expand immigration courts to speed up both deportations and asylum claims, yet “certain groups are either demanding, ‘my way or no way,’ or don’t actually want it to be solved,” she said.
The couple spoke before thousands in the San Diego Convention Center about the challenges facing a polarized world, including the Israel-Hamas war and the spread of artificial intelligence, as part of the Professional Convention Management Association’s Convening Leaders conference.
Both said Americans needed to better engage people they disagreed with.
“The best politics and democratic politics over the long run,” Bill Clinton, 77, said, “is empowerment politics, not victim politics.”
The room was largely friendly, although it wasn’t always clear whether someone was standing to clap or take a photo. The biggest applause came when Hillary Clinton, 76, addressed double standards in public life.
“There is also this expectation that women have to be perfect and men just have to be, you know, men,” she said. Bill Clinton, smiling, slumped slightly to the side, head on his hand.
The writer and interviewer Holly Ransom questioned the couple for almost an hour. While Bill Clinton alluded to Donald Trump early on, saying “it’s not so clear anymore” that the nation would always resist “a dictator,” it took almost 20 minutes for the Republican front runner in this year’s presidential election to be brought up by name.
“A lot of Donald Trump’s juice, when he started, came from people who grew up in my part of America,” said the former two-term Democratic president, who was born in Arkansas. “Trump was great at rubbin’ salt in people’s wounds.”
Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in the 2016 election.
She endorsed continued support for Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion (“I personally have dealt with Putin quite a few times — apparently he didn’t like me very much”), slammed Hamas’ “barbaric, savage attack” last October that killed about 1,200 Israelis and offered a measured reminder that Israel’s response, which has left an estimated 22,800 Palestinians dead, must “abide by the laws of war.”
Clinton alluded to her husband’s role decades ago in the Oslo peace accords and its aftermath. “He made an offer to the Palestinians back in 2000, that if they had accepted it, they would have had a state now for 23 years,” she said.
The former senator and first lady went on to declare that the government needs to closely regulate artificial intelligence. “They’re creating things they don’t understand themselves,” she said about tech leaders.
The Clintons did not take questions from the audience or the press. Convention spokesperson Meghan Risch declined to disclose the couple’s fee.
A press release said their appearance was supported by the Orange County Convention Center and Visit Orlando, and the session began with several people encouraging attendees to host business meetings in Florida.
At one point, the interviewer asked if the Clintons had policy arguments at their kitchen table.
“Is the Pope a Catholic?” Bill Clinton responded.
He ended up sharing how they taught their daughter to calmly listen to criticism of her parents.
When Bill Clinton was running for governor of Arkansas, he held mock debates with Chelsea, who was then 6 years old. Each family member would play a different candidate: Chelsea sometimes pretended to be Bill, while Bill played one of his opponents, and the two took turns denouncing each other.
“You have to learn how” to have “these conversations without going nuts,” Bill Clinton said Tuesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
