The New Hillary, the new biotechnology, and the new world order

Hillary Clinton stops by the BIO International Convention to reflect on world leaders, pressing issues and not a little on climate change and the role of biotechnology.

If you are a fan of the New Testament’s Book of James, you’ll remember the admonition that “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead,” and if you’ve ever been through Sunday School in the Methodist Church, you’d have heard an awful lot about it.

There are conservative Methodists and liberal Methodists — but there aren’t too many do-nothing Methodists. Activism is the order of the day, and some of them combine Wesleyan activism with a Midwestern frankness that bedevils them with media trouble.

So, Hillary Clinton returns to the stage in the midst of a big book tour, and starts out a conversation about climate change with “The debate is not about climate. That debate is settled. It’s about what were going to do about it.”

And we know that, in a conversation that is likely to range far beyond climate change and into the murky mildews of the Middle East and the opportunities with China and Russia, we are going to get it, and get it straight, and probably no spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

With that in mind, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that she’s a Methodist, which it turns out she is, and that she must have been the one in the front row at Sunday School, actually listening to Teacher. Her office, you might think, has sometimes been a cabinet post but always a ministry. There’s a good deal of Wellesley in Hillary Rodham Clinton, but if you look a little closer, there’s just a little more John Wesley.

She’s seated today with former Pennsylvania congressman and BIO CEO Jim Greenwood for an extended interview on stage at the BIO International Convention. There are several thousand in the lunch room. The applause breaks out from time to time, but mostly the audience is rapt, leaning in to hear.

The security was tight, as convention luncheons go. No guaranteed seating, everyone had to stand in line, and the line seemed endless. It took nearly fifteen minutes to walk from the lunchroom entrance to the back of the line, as it snaked around the San Diego Convention Center.

The hoopla is reminiscent of a presidential campaign, but Clinton is not yet in campaign mode. Reflecting primarily on her years as Secretary of State, she’s engaged in the present, but looking back at 2009-2013 to give her audience the inside background on leaders, issues and not a little on climate change and the role of biotechnology.

Relaxed and sometimes playful, she dances adroitly around any questions about her Presidential intentions, and spends some time recalling adventures during her college years.

The early days

“Yes, I once worked at a fishery during college as a slimer,” she recalled.

“Some friends and I had gone driving up to Alaska, going up the Al-Can highway in the days before it was fully paved, taking odd jobs along the way. I worked as a dishwasher, at one place, and we camped out to save money. We went up to Valdez near Denali National Park, where I got work on a ship that was processing salmon.

“So they told me I was to be a slimer, and they gave me a pair of hip boots and a spoon and my job was to clean out the inside of the fish. I was slow, and by the third day I complained that the salmon didn’t look healthy, there were colors of yellow and blue that you’re not supposed to see in salmon, and the next day they kicked me upstairs to do another menial job where I would make less trouble.

“But I still complained. So they fired me. I said, but I worked four days, you need to pay me. And they said, come back tomorrow and we’ll pay you. So I came back the next day and they had packed up and gone. I learned a number of lessons from that experience.”

Clinton on biotechnology

Early in her remarks, she delves into the complex world of biotechnology — the balancing of the enormous risks in developing new drugs, the high costs (thereby) imposed on the “winners” to recoup those expenses and provide a commensurate return for the risk — and the challenges of genetic enhancement, the opposition of activists and more.

She is concerned about creating a regulatory and tax regime that would ultimately drive biotech companies offshore. She affirmed her support for states and the federal government in creating a framework where there are rewards for biotech companies that are commensurate with the financial risks they run — where it can cost $1.5 billion to bring a drug to market and where most drugs do not recoup their investment.

It was something the Federal Government was going to have to take on. “When it comes to tax and regulations, states have a role to play, but we need a federal framework.”

She worried aloud that state-subsidized, overseas regimes were waiting for biotech firms to exhaust themselves under a burden of US regulations and the difficulties in accessing capital with an appetite for the risks involved.

“Overseas, we’ll see more state-owned business, subsidizing that biotech risk. We have to figure out how our system can respond. We have to figure out risk and reward in our system. We don’t want to see biotech companies go offshore. We don’t want to face competition from overseas from technologies that we have nurtured.”

But it was not only the prospect of US companies going offshore that was of concern. She noted the enormous capital deployments, the venture risk in biotechnology for developing breakthrough drugs, fuels, food and feed. The enormous rewards for those who succeeded. And the costs that the process imposes on the consumer.

But, gradually, the conversation turned towards towards thorny international issues. To regimes with different systems and beliefs, and how engagement has proceeded, and how it should proceed.

And so, the dialogue turns not only to the “Hard Choices” that Clinton detailed in her most recent book of the same name, but to the issues that will face those who take office following the Presidential elections in 2016. Putin, Iran, Iraq, China. The big ones.

She is surrounded by an entourage above and beyond what a BIO keynote speaker generally commands — even what a former cabinet secretary, Senator and First Lady generally command. Arriving in from Virginia to introduce her is Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Before McAuliffe, California Gov. Jerry Brown took the stage to welcome delegates to the luncheon and to California. Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts was on the floor.

As the lunchtime dialogue began, she praised dialogue itself. Recalling the ongoing undisclosed talks between Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton during the 1996 government shutdown. “Even during shutdown, Newt and Bill kept talking, the private dialogue never stopped. Newt Gingrich would say some pretty awful things on television during the day, but then in the evening he would come by the White House, and he and Bill would talk.”

She was asked about how to solve pressing problems in an atmosphere more partisan than ever. “Getting to ‘Yes’ on the financial crises and other issues, you have to start with relationships before you get to hard choices.

But there was a strong place for leading by example, she said, as the conversation turned to climate change.

“The US has to be at every table [in negotiation], but we won’t have credibility unless we lead by example in climate.”

On climate change and the Copenhagen Conference

“We wanted to get something at Copenhagen, even it was just a baby step,” she recalled.

“Leading up to the conference we were talking to China, India and the rest of the developing nations, to get them to commit to some measures. They had said that they didn’t have commit to measures themselves, it was on the West, they were developing economies and countries. When we came to Copenhagen, at one critical point in the process, we couldn’t find the Chinese, the South Africans, the Brazilians anywhere. We were told they were gone. We asked, “How can they be gone, the conference is just underway?”.

“So, we sent out scouts everywhere. We found them hiding in a room, meeting together behind drawn curtains. When we heard that, I looked at the President, and he looked at me, and we said “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” So, we crashed the meeting. It was like a motorcade rolling along, on foot. We called it Footcade.

“And we would walk by and the guards would all say, “No! No! No!”

“And we were saying ‘Hi! Hi Hi!'”

“And we just kept on going, and we got to the door, and there was this arm out [from one of the guards, blocking the way]. And the president just brushed on by and went through it. And we said “Hi! We’ve been looking for you!”

But as the dialogue on climate change turned to steps that the US can take, she embraced the pragmatic, bottom-up, enterprise-oriented approach advocated by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson and Tom Steyer in their recent “Risky Business” report that has been making an impact this week in policy circles.

[Note to readers: the Risky Business Project focuses on quantifying and publicizing the economic risks from the impacts of a changing climate.Risky Business Project co-chairs Michael R. Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Tom Steyer tasked the Rhodium Group with an independent assessment of the economic risks posed by a changing climate in the U.S.

“Right now,” say the authors “cities and businesses are scrambling to adapt to a changing climate without sufficient federal government support, resulting in a virtual “unfunded mandate by omission” to deal with climate at the local level. We believe that American businesses should play an active role in helping the public sector determine how best to react to the risks and costs posed by climate change, and how to set the rules that move the country forward in a new, more sustainable direction.]

Clinton’s take? “The Paulson, Steyer, Bloomberg proposal is right. Businesses should build climate risk into their risk analysis.” That will help immeasurably, she noted, to move the dialogue forward, when you have leadership from US businesses, whose concerns are harder for opponents to discount.

She cited it as an example of positive engagement. “On climate change, you have to separate those dug in on ideology from those taking advantage for economic gain.”

On China

“When I was appointed and I began reaching out to leaders, many of whom I knew but also many new ones, I heard a deep concern that over the past 8 years of our engagement in the Middle East, our Asian friends and allies felt no longer important, and I was asked “Is the US still committed to being an Asia-Pacific power?” So, when I made my first trip, it was to Asia.

“With China, we want a positive comprehensive relationship. It doesn’t mean we don’t have differences. It means that we will seek to avoid confrontation and conflict. So, we have to make a much broader commitment to dialogue on the issues where we can find a middle ground, such as food safety, or intellectual property. We disagree, to give one example, about the South China Sea. But with China there is no substitute for strategic patience and deep engagement.

“There are a lot of potential hot spots in the relationship. It is important to be involved, and keep a cool head, and persuade China to be a good and active stakeholder.”

On Iraq

“The Bush Administration negotiated the withdrawal for 2011, it was fully in place before the President took office, and I was appointed. We had to renegotiate formally for post 2011 role in Iraq, if we wanted to keep troops or play an expanded role we would have to negotiate that. For example, there’s a standard agreement that we have that ensures that US troops, serving in a foreign country, remain under US military law and military jurisdiction. And Iraq didn’t want to allow that, so we didn’t have an agreement, and we left.

“But there was the agreement that has been signed, and Iraq didn’t live up to it. For example, there was this group, the Sunni Awakening, the Iraqi government agreed that it would pay this group, and they reneged. The Sunnis were supposed to have a share in government, but they were driven out. The Iraqi government had ensured the alienation of the sunni leadership and rank and file.

“Meanwhile the Kurds were building a stable social system and engaging in a lot more economic activity, and it was a nascent democracy. The ground was laid for discontent. It led to the ISIS group (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) which rose up in Syria, but was always linked to Iraq. Assad in Syria has survived as long as he has based on Russian support, iranian support and Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is essentially a proxy of Iran.

“Now we needed to form a coalition between the Government and Sunni sheiks to fight against ISIS, but Sunnis have to feel they have a future, and I don’t think Maliki will deliver. No successful operation against ISIS will happen without this coalition, and Obama is following the right policy of not being committed to doing very much unless we have a Clear view on what Maliki and Iran are going to do.

“Sending in the 300 experts to Iraq to give us a better view is a good start, but I don’t want to to be in same arena as iranians unless we know what that means. There are a lot of unanswered questions before i would be comfortable with doing more than the president is doing.

On Iranian nuclear ambitions

“When we came into office, we found two troubling situations. First, Iran was moving straight ahead toward producing nuclear weapons and making them deliverable with a missile system. Second, the rest of world was pessimistic that anything could be done.

“We decided on a two track strategy of pressure and engagement. First, we worked on getting sanctions in the security council and getting them enforced, that could change the calculus for Iran and get them to the table. It was difficult to implement them, because a lot of Asian and Southern European countries were highly dependent on the oil imports and had to cut, and it was very complicated. It was helpful that the US shale oil was increasing because that reduced imports here and made oil more available for those countries.”

“When the sanctions were clearly biting, the Iranians voted in Rouhani and he was given a green light on negotiations. There is an opening for an enforceable agreement, but I left office just after the first meeting had taken place. If we cant get agreement, what can we get? The alternative is some kind of military response ,and that comes with consequences that are unforeseen and unintended.

“The Iranians want to deal, but on their terms, so the P5+1 group — that’s the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany — will need to apply more pressure.”

On Putin and Russia

“What dies Putin want? I had a positive engagement with with President Medvedev, and then Putin announced he would come back as president and Medvedev would become prime minister.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, she added. “You have to admire the system, where it’s very clean, there’s no need to campaign. You can just stand on a stage and make an announcement, and that’s it.” Then, BIO’s CEO Jim Greenwood quipped “well, you can make an announcement right here on this stage.”

“Putin doesn’t want to to build something new. He wants to restore what was lost. He wants what used to be. He thinks it was a disaster it was when the USSR fell apart. He has a strong commitment to Mother Russia. He’s almost Czarist in his attitude. He demonstrates greatness through intimidation and annexation. When he saw disruption in Ukraine, as Ukraine was seeking to be a bridge between East and West, he wanted to make a statement. He sees his proposed Eurasian Union as competitor to the European Union. He seeks a Russia defined by territorial reach, he wants Russia to gets its way by force, which is why he is making a lot of moves in the Arctic.

How to respond? “You have to build coalitions. To the EU, we’ve said said you’ve got to diversify your energy supply, you are hostage to Russia. We saw them shut off Poland and others in ’06 and ’09.”

On political office

“You ran for President and you lost…” said Greenwood. “That’s right!” Clinton interjected. “…of your high school class in 1965.” Greenwood continued.

Clinton did a double take, and laughed. “I did run, yes.”

“And your opponent at the time said that it wasn’t right for a woman to be President,” Greenwood added.

“He did,” Clinton said.

“But you ran for President four years later of your college class, and you won.”

“Yes, and that was an all-women college!” laughed Clinton.

“What have you learned from the experience of running for President?’ Greenwood asked.

She paused, and turned serious. “When you think how hard the political world is, it has to be bigger than yourself, or it is just soul killing.”

And then she dished out two sayings two sayings of Eleanor Roosevelt that she has been using in recent months and recent speeches.

“Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1920s said that women in politics or in public roles should grow skin like a rhinoceros,” Clinton recalled. “And there was another one that has been a favorite of mine, “A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.”

Hmm, Madam Secretary is developing a stump speech. Could be just the book tour. But maybe not.