Former President Bill Clinton will be delivering the Spring 2007 commencement at the University of Michigan according to a press release issued this week by the University. The press release--like much of the liberal analysis of the Clinton presidency--trumpets Clinton's accomplishments including "welfare reform" and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Of course, this list of achievements fails to take into account the devastating effects of Clinton's policies, including the loss of jobs in both the United States and Mexico and the increase in poverty in Mexico as a result of NAFTA, the fact that welfare reform did little to combat poverty, the militarization of the United States-Mexico border and the deaths of more than 4,000 immigrants on the border since 1994's Operation Gatekeeper, and Clinton's support for neoliberal globalization. Clinton presided over a multi-year campaign in Iraq--overshadowed now by the ongoing military occupation--but including four days of intensive bombing in 1998 and the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions imposed on the country. When questioned about whether or not the deaths of "half a million children" were "worth it," Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright stated on 60 Minutes that "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we [the Clinton administration] think the price is worth it ." Clinton's victories in 1992 and 1996 also helped to usher in a rightward shift towards the "center" in the Democratic Party that remains to this day.

Over the past few years, high-profile speakers with ties to the Iraq War and the United States' neoliberal foreign policy have been routinely met by protests, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2002 and 2003, President George W. Bush at Calvin College last year in Grand Rapids, and World Bank president James Wolfenson at MSU in 2000.