-Caveat Lector- With typical liberal rhetoric, Clinton bemoans the world condition just as if he did not spend the last 8 years in the White House! Why didn't HIS administration address some of his late-in-the- game concerns? Because it is total hypocrisy, that's why. But it does make him sound better than he actually is and it is certainly more noble than his "I told the American people the truth more than I lied to them." remarks. Amelia Clinton offers US global agenda By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 12/18/2000 WASHINGTON - He was at his most eloquent, talking about moral responsibility for the world's poor, arguing that an isolated America only hurts itself, rolling out numbers to show that if the nation paid its fair share to stop AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, it would only equal the US government's annual bill for office supplies. And yet President Clinton delivered two major foreign policy addresses - one in Nebraska on Dec. 8, the other in England last week - just a little more than a month before he leaves office, with no expectation that the incoming Bush administration would follow his lead. His words left many who work on behalf of the world's poor extraordinarily sad, some of them bitter. ''Too little, too late,'' said Amir Attaran, director for international health research at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. ''My feeling is that the 11th hour was a mighty long time to discover all this. I mean, these problems aren't things that were fresh to be discovered.'' Samuel R. Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, said in an interview last week, however, that the president had begun to build a record of helping the developing world and wanted to state his case of what was needed ahead. Berger said the Bush administration and Congress would be hard pressed to ignore the devastating impact globalization has had so far on the poorest nations. ''Part of these speeches is establishing what we think the base line is in going forward,'' Berger said. ''Clearly, this has developed through a process of evolution, of learning from experience, or seeing the world more clearly. I'm sure that the new administration will have its own ideas and new priorities, but I think that the US cannot go backwards on these global issues of climate change, AIDS, digital divide, and debt relief, because the world has changed.'' Fred I. Greenstein, a Princeton presidential scholar and author of ''The Presidential Difference,'' had another view of Clinton, whom he described as full of restless energy. ''Among lame ducks, none of them were busier than him, few kept going like he is,'' Greenstein said. ''With Clinton, it's almost as if he is looking for things that will somehow reconstruct the whole picture of his presidency: one more speech and Monica goes down to the third paragraph of the obituary.'' In numerous speeches over the past three years, Clinton has outlined his concerns about the dangers of globalization and the need to increase international funding to cut poor countries' huge debt loads, put more children in school, and provide better health services. But the two recent speeches argued the case with more fervor and detail, and the England speech included a stronger call for the world's 22 donor nations to contribute their fair share to the poor. Traveling to America's heartland on Dec. 8, Clinton made the case of US involvement in a state that is geographically distant from other nations but tightly linked to the global economy. He concluded: ''We don't have to be cheap. Our economy is the envy of the world. We don't have to swim against the currents of the world. The momentum of history is on our side. ... And we don't have the excuse of ignorance, because we've got a 24-hour global news cycle. We know what's going on out there.'' What's going on, he said in England on Thursday, was shameful to watch in the developing world. ''We know perfectly well today how children live and die in the poorest countries, and how little it would take to make a difference in their lives,'' he said. ''In a global information age we can no longer have the excuse of ignorance. We can choose not to act, of course, but we can no longer choose not to know.'' He added, ''With the Cold War over, no overriding struggle for survival diverts us from aiding the survival of the hundreds of millions of people in the developing world struggling just to get by day to day.'' The difference between what the world provides and what the world needs to fight AIDS, malaria, and TB was $6 billion a year, he said. The US fair share of that amount would be $1.5 billion, he said - or ''about the same as our government spends every year on office supplies, or about what the people of Britain spend every year on blue jeans.'' In fiscal year 2001, the US government will spend $466 million for international AIDS efforts, up from $244 million last year and $135 million in 1999. In 1998, according to figures compiled by Harvard's Attaran and Jeffrey Sachs, donor countries spent $69 million, or $3 per HIV-infected person. That was down from more than $15 per HIV-infected person in 1988. Attaran said that even if the amount of money needed to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria were $10 billion, ''this is so totally affordable to the United States; you only need to do the math.'' The math: The 22 donor nations produce an annual income of $21 trillion, so $10 billion is about 0.05 percent of all their income combined. ''Would Americans want to put 0.02 percent of their wealth toward the greatest plague since the the 14th century? My sense is they probably would, and that isn't a partisan issue,'' Attaran said. Clinton also said on Thursday that globalization was tearing down all barriers, that ''what happens anywhere is felt in a flash everywhere, from Coventry to Kansas to Cambodia. ... In a single hour today, more people and more goods move from continent to continent than moved in the entire 19th century.'' In Kansas City, Mo., Frank J. Smist Jr., the director of the global studies center at Rockhurst College, said the speech was a powerful expression of change and the administration's policy, but, ''I just feel such great disappointment. ''It was one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency, but why did he wait eight years? I look at the eight years as an awful lot of missed opportunities.'' In Brussels, Seth Amgot, a spokesman for Oxfam America, was so moved by the speech that he sent copies to dozens of colleagues. But even in his praise for the administration's push for $435 million in debt relief to poor nations, he acknowledged, ''It was hard work getting them where they are.'' Clinton concluded his speech Thursday by saying that ''no generation has ever had the opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that leaves no one behind. ... For eight years, I have done what I could to lead my country down that path. I think for the rest of our lives, we had all better stay on it.'' But will Bush? Asked about the next president's intent, Berger laughed. ''I can't do much about that one,'' he said. ''Unless we continue to move ahead - and I believe we've created a frame of reference with which to view this - we are going to pay a price as a country.'' This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 12/18/2000. � Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company. 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