Bill Clinton tells students at UCF leadership is key to solutions

By Jeff Kunerth
Sentinel Staff Writer
8:01 PM EDT, August 9, 2009

Five days after negotiating the release of two American journalists from a North Korean prison, former President Bill Clinton brought a global perspective of problem solving to a group of aspiring student leaders Sunday at the University of Central Florida.

Addressing the inaugural class of the Lawton Chiles Leadership Corps, Bill Clinton told the crowd of about 700 people that the problems facing Florida are the same as those in Africa, Australia, Haiti and Korea. Issues of inequality, instability and unsustainability apply as much to the Sunshine State's low ranking in educational spending as they do the poverty in Haiti, the forest fires in Australia, and the HIV epidemic in Africa.

Florida's problems with education, the economy and the environment can't be solved by asking what should we do and how much should we spend any more than global warming or epidemic disease in poor nations can be cured by money and politics, Bill Clinton said.

The only way to reach solutions is to figure out how it should be done. That's leadership, he said.

"Leadership today is deciding how to solve these problems and then going out and doing it," the 42nd president said.

Clinton's appearance was scheduled before his successful release Wednesday of Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, who were stopped March 17 by soldiers near North Korea's border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking. They faced years of imprisonment in the gulag-like confines of a North Korean prison camp.

Working for former Vice President Al Gore's Current TV venture, both were sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor for entering the country illegally. Clinton's only reference to North Korea was that when he stepped out of the plane in Florida, he realized it's a lot hotter here than in North Korea.

Orlando was Clinton's second appearance of the day. Earlier, he was in Miami addressing the Haitian community.

In his remarks at UCF, he said a practical approach is applicable anywhere in the world, regardless of wealth and education.

"Everywhere I go in the world, I find intelligence and effort are evenly distributed," he said.

As an example, Clinton told of a young man in Haiti who organized an effort to collect garbage from the streets, separate the trash into food scraps, paper, plastic and glass. The food was turned into organic fertilizer and the paper was processed into fuel that could be sold for a penny to cook food. The "how-to" solution produced a cleaner neighborhood, income for its residents, cheap cooking fuel for families, and a feeling of optimism among the residents.

The burden of poverty, he said, isn't the lack of money, but the loss of hope -- the feeling that tomorrow will be no better than today.

"When you learn tomorrow doesn't have to be like yesterday, a whole new world opens up," he said.

Clinton's UCF visit was arranged by the Lawton Chiles Foundation, created to continue the late governor's work. The high school and college students who attended the weekend-long Chiles Leadership Corps training focused on raising Florida's per-pupil spending from "worst to first" among the states by collecting 1 million signatures urging the Legislature to increase funding for public education.

Clinton encouraged their activism, but also urged them to think of how they, as individuals, can make a difference.

"You can make a better tomorrow for Florida," he said.

The inability to deal with the problems of scarcer resources, rising costs, and rapid change is not confined to Florida. It's everyone, everywhere, Clinton said.

"This is a global problem," he said. "Hardly anyone is organized for the world we are living in."