Former President Bill Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan hosted the latest in the Frank and Kula Kumpuris Distinguished Lecture Series at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock on Sunday, where they discussed the polarization of American politics, the importance of bipartisanship and finding a middle ground.
Clinton, who was president from 1993 to 2001, was also governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981, and then from 1983 to 1992.
Hogan, a Republican, became governor of Democratic-leaning Maryland in 2015 on a platform of fiscal responsibility and left office in 2023 after guiding his state through the covid-19 pandemic with some of the ‘highest approval in the country. Many people offered his name as a possible 2024 Republican candidate to challenge Republican front-runner Donald Trump for the party’s nomination. Hogan said in March that he did not plan to run in the 2024 race.
On Sunday, Hogan said he has never been more concerned about the state of the American political landscape. Most Americans, he said, consider themselves moderate or near the center of the political spectrum. Despite this, the loudest voices in the political world tend to be those at the ends of the political spectrum, Hogan said.
“I’m concerned about the Republican Party, that now we have 12 people running for president and there seems to be one person who gets almost all of them, more than half of the votes and nobody else gets any kind of traction,” Hogan said.
The political focus can’t be on the past, Hogan said, citing the Jan. 6, 2021 protest and voter denial for the 2020 election that has been a central focus of many Republicans’ campaign messages. Instead, politicians should focus on getting the economy going and improving education.
Clinton agreed, recalling that especially after her election to the presidency and the election of former President Barack Obama, things went wrong on the right. Many on the far right, Clinton said, see government as an inherent evil. He emphasized the need to return to bipartisan cooperation.
“We can disagree without being nasty,” Hogan said. He added that the country needed to return to the days when people would sit down, put aside their differences and work together to solve important problems.
Clinton and Hogan also addressed the conversation about immigration.
Clinton pointed out that the US birth rate is below the replacement rate needed to keep the country’s population stable; there’s no point in being anti-immigration because of it, he said.
“We have made a decision as a country that we would rather have a problem than a solution [to the immigration issue]” Clinton said.
Hogan pointed out that people are always talking to each other and trying to one-up each other. Most Americans, he said, want both a secure border and a path to citizenship for immigrants. He highlighted the need for solutions to the issue of immigration instead of a constant debate.
As they focused on matters of political importance, both men took a few moments to reflect on their time out of office. Hogan joked that it was tea
He asked himself how to drive again after being driven all his years in office, while Clinton said the reason he was elected so many times was specifically because voters didn’t want him to drive.
Clinton and Hogan also answered questions from the audience. An audience member asked what Clinton saw as the biggest threat to democracy. The former president said his biggest concern was that Americans would “willingly give it up.”
Clinton cited concerns that the world’s “information ecosystem” had been compromised by the rise of social media, bots and trolls. He said he was concerned that Americans would only listen to viewpoints they agreed with.
“[His mother-in-law] she forced herself to listen to Fox News an hour a day,” even though Clinton described her as the most liberal member of her family.
When Clinton asked him why he did that, he “said, ‘Nobody’s wrong all the time. And secondly, if they’re wrong, I have to know how to respond. I have to listen to them.'”
“That’s good advice,” Clinton added.
Hillary Clinton, Clinton’s wife, former US Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, also attended the conference.
