Former President Bill Clinton said when he was president, both parties worked together to find solutions to issues that mattered to Americans, but intense partisanship is preventing today's lawmakers from making progress.
"Everybody has forgotten that our Founding Fathers, that we tend to deify, were actually deal-makers and they set up a system that requires deal-making," Clinton said to an audience of historians at the 2014 Presidential Sites & Libraries Conference Tuesday night.
The three-day conference, which ends today, is a national event held quadrennially at a site with connections to the American presidency.
The Clinton Presidential Center was the site for this year's event, which was themed "Historical Context and Modern Reality." Clinton was Tuesday night's keynote speaker. The event marked the first time a former president attended a Presidential Sites & Libraries Conference.
In a roughly 40-minute speech, Clinton spoke on a wide range of topics, including the current political landscape, what can be learned from studying past presidencies and his endorsement of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal announced this week that would limit carbon emissions from power plants.
Clinton said that the welfare reforms passed during his presidency were the result of a complicated process, but that it worked because both sides wanted to reach a solution.
"Basically what you need to know is that the leadership in both parties actually wanted something to happen," he said. "Both parties thought they were hired to show up and get something done."
He said today's lawmakers could stand to learn from their predecessors.
"Wherever people are working together with the aim of getting something done, good things will happen," he said."And wherever people's primary operational mode is to fight and emphasize our differences over our common humanity, good things are not happening."
Clinton said presidential libraries are important because they allow people to understand the decisions made by past leaders.
"It is important to try, insofar as we possibly can, to give people the context in which these decisions were made," he said. "Giving context to these decisions helps people try to seek out the context for today's decisions."
Through presidential centers, leaders can use history to try to figure out how to get today's problems solved, Clinton said.
"All of us have an interest in that," he said. "None of us want America to fail."
Clinton said one of his main goals for the presidential center and library, which opened in 2004, was to encourage active citizenship among Americans.
Stephanie Streett, executive director of the Clinton foundation, said the Clinton Presidential Center has also had economic benefits for Little Rock.
"Since 1997 when President Clinton announced this as the site for his presidential center, more than $3 billion has been invested in downtown Little Rock alone," she said.
Metro on 06/04/2014