The big 6-0 is fast approaching and Bill Clinton says he hates it – man, does he hate it.
Once, the nation’s 42nd president was the youngest person in the room. Now, he often is the oldest – and, for Clinton, that’s hard to take.
The soon-to-be sexagenarian – he turns 60 on Saturday – admitted yesterday at the 16th International AIDS conference in Toronto, where he is the featured speaker, that the milestone fills him with fear.
Delegates responded by serenading him with “Happy Birthday.”
“In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it’s true,” Clinton grumbled.
“For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing what I was doing. Then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room,” said the silver-haired baby boomer, who was 44 when elected to his first term.
His remarks contrasted with those of President Bush, who said, “It’s a lot younger than you think,” when he turned 60 on July 6.
Since leaving office in 2001, Clinton has devoted himself to his William J. Clinton Foundation, which focuses on AIDS and providing lower-priced drugs and diagnostic equipment to poorer countries.
“Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day,” said youngest president ever to leave office.
The man from Arkansas, whose 60th birthday celebrations will continue for months, then launched into his life story – discussing how he was born into poverty and never knew his father, who died before he was born.
“I realize that I came from, by American standards, very humble circumstances when I was born in my home state at the end of World War II,” he said,
“Our per-capita income was barely half the national average. And I had a totally improbable life.
“But I know I was not born in a log cabin that I built myself,” he added. “I had teachers, a coherent community, a decent health-care system. I knew that there would be some connection between the efforts I made in life and the results that I achieved.”
In an interview later with ABC News, Clinton took issue with Sen. Joe Lieberman, for whom he had campaigned.
Lieberman has described his loss to anti-war liberal Ned Lamont as liberals in the Democratic Party purging those with the Lieberman-Clinton position of progressiveness in domestic politics and strong national security credentials.
Clinton disagreed.
“Well, if I were Joe and I was running as an independent, that’s what I’d say, too,” said Clinton. “But that’s not quite right. That is, there were almost no Democrats who agreed with his position, which was, ‘I want to attack Iraq whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.’
“His position is the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position, which was, ‘Does it matter if they have weapons? None of this matters . . . This is a big, important priority, and 9/11 gives us the way of attacking and deposing Saddam,’ ” the former president added.
Clinton said that a vote for Lamont was not – as Lieberman implied – a vote against the country’s security.
With Post Wire Services