They’ve gone gooey over Bill Clinton in the December Esquire, their “Best and Brightest 2005″ issue. Editor David Granger writes about how “the next twenty or thirty years could be the most productive of his life…His new freedom, along with the global affection for him, his unmatched capacity for compassion, and his unparalleled access to the world’s centers of power and money can combine to make him the most powerful agent of positive change in the world. Bill Clinton can become something like a president of the world or, at the least, a president of the world’s non-governmental organizations — and from that vantage, he can marshal a power unfettered by any petty political concerns: the power to do good.” It’s like Tiger Beat for old guys.
The official cover story by Joe Conason adds the polish that the Clinton Foundation has dramatically lowered the prices of AIDS drugs for Africa, “an achievement that is already saving hundreds of thousands of lives and promises to save millions more.”
Clinton, in turn, takes the chance to buff Jimmy Carter’s image: “I’ve never met anyone who did more with the gifts God gave him than Jimmy Carter.”