Bill Clinton loved being president of the United States. “I never would have gotten tired of it,” he told a full house at the BankUnited Center. “I also love my life now. I realized there are things I can do as a citizen that I couldn’t do as president.”

Clinton, who served in the White House from 1993 to 2001, addressed members of the UM community on March 1 as the 2007 Spring Convocation speaker. His lecture focused on five questions that “every citizen of every country, starting with America, must be able to ask and answer.” The first was, “What is the fundamental character of the 21st-century world?” His answer: “interdependence,” which is similar to globalization.

We are connected by “a global awareness of things that would have been unthinkable a generation ago,” he said, pointing to uniting factors like travel, trade, and information technology. He also noted that world hunger and disease, vulnerability to terrorism, climate change, and depletion of natural resources make our interdependent world unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.

“You only have to embrace one simple idea: that your differences are interesting and make life more exciting and aid the search for truth and progress, but your common humanity matters more,” he said. “We must try to have a world with more partners and fewer enemies.”

Clinton applied this logic to policies on the Middle East, the importance of volunteerism, global warming, health care, the economy, and other weighty topics. He concluded his visit in a Q&A session with UM President Donna E. Shalala, who he said “served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services longer than anyone in history but also better than anyone else who ever had that job.”

Shalala read student-submitted questions to her former boss, including one on outsourcing. Clinton asserted that we have “ignored our bird’s nest on the ground. A commitment to a clean, efficient energy future would produce millions and millions of jobs that would not easily be outsourced.”

Clinton’s emphasis on a sustainable future echoed the riveting lecture at the BankUnited Center a day earlier by his former vice president, Al Gore. Gore delivered An Inconvenient Truth, the multimedia presentation based on his bestselling book and Oscar-winning film of the same name.