It's All Matt Yglesias Day

Matt:

In those fields (education, poverty alleviation, global public health, and climate change), it really seems to me that Bill Clinton could do much more good using his charisma and standing to try to convince rich guys and executives at big companies to take a more enlightened attitude toward the political process, to return to the sort of public-spirited involvement in public affairs that characterized the business class in the 1950s and 60s. Realistically, you can't resolve climate change if the United States of America is in the grips of a fanatic ideological aversion to taxes and regulation, an ideological aversion that American business has spent -- and continues to spend -- tons of money propagating and re-enforcing. Similarly, you could do a ton of poverty alleviation if you worked through the political process to reorient America's global engagement away from such a lopsided reliance on the military. But somebody other than defense contractors and Israeli nationalists would need to invest serious money in foreign policy ideas.