Yesterday, former president Bill Clinton gave a speech here in Fayetteville as part of a statue dedication ceremony in honor of former senator J. William Fulbright. It was quite a moving speech, actually, even for those of us who have grown fairly cynical about politics in general. I haven’t found a full text to link to yet, but the broad strokes covered the role of the United Nations and moving ethically beyond religious, racial, and other sorts of antagonisms based on exclusive ideas of what it means to be human (he actually touched on Rorty’s ideas a bit, though he didn’t mention him). It was a refreshingly thoughtful (even philosophical) antidote to the current, election-year barage of partisan knee jerking.