Bill Clinton Anna and Richard Gaz stepped out of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza the evening of Oct. 4 and shared their thoughts on the wide-ranging speech former President Bill Clinton had given moments earlier to a sold-out audience.

“I think, with us, he accomplished what he wanted to do, which was to give us a different framework of thinking about what’s happening (in the world),” said Anna Gaz, a Newbury Park resident.

The two-term president touched on a host of topics—national healthcare, global warming, international relations and the financial crisis—while offering a world leader’s perspective on today’s headlines and inviting the audience to take civic action.

“The one great thing about not being president anymore is that you can say whatever you want. The bad thing is that nobody cares what you have to say any more—unless your wife is secretary of state,” Clinton said in his opening remarks, eliciting laughter.

Clinton’s appearance, which included a brief question-and-answer portion, kicked off the new season of the Distinguished Speaker Series of Southern California that brought the 42nd president to the local venue and drew a sellout crowd of 1,800. He’s the first U.S. president to speak in the series’ 10 years.

Clinton made the local stop after a recent trip to Haiti, where the former Arkansas governor has been working with Haitian government officials to help the island nation establish economic stability as part of his ongoing envoy work for his New Yorkbased William J. Clinton Foundation.

Since he left office, Clinton has spent the past nine years using his political clout to help tackle global issues such as poverty, AIDs and genocide, mostly in African and Latin American countries.

Using stories from his trips to Haiti, Rwanda and other beleaguered nations to emphasize his points, Clinton spoke about the ever-evolving landscape of international politics and how domestic policies affect the rest of the world.

Although following the news is “like trying to understand chaos theory in physics,” Clinton said, it’s important to recognize the growing interdependency among nations. From the flood of new technology to the dangers of global warming, Clinton said Americans need to understand that their actions affect people in other countries.

“I think the most important characteristic of the modern world is that it is by far the most interdependent era in world history,” Clinton said. “That means what happens here affects people half a world away.”

Clinton said the growing cultural diversity both in the U.S. and worldwide is further proof of a global shift to interdependency.

Clinton noted that during President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Denmark to back Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games, Obama pointed to the fact that Chicago—like many major U.S. cities—is home to people from more than 160 countries.

The former president spoke about healthcare, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Clinton said, “The most dangerous thing we can do with our healthcare system right now is nothing.” A longtime advocate for public healthcare, he said the current system impacts not only the poor but also America’s middle class.

Each year a quarter of the people who die worldwide are killed by AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and infectious diseases related to dirty water, he said. And of those who die annually from diseases brought on by contaminated water, 80 percent are children under age 5.

“They are the diseases of the poor,” Clinton said.

He said dealing with international problems requires an understanding that, despite geography and culture, human beings share more than 99.9 percent of the same genetic coding.

“Our differences do matter, but our commonalities matter more.”

Clinton said he believes world leaders should understand that good diplomacy allows both sides to benefit from the solution. He called it a “win-win” approach to politics.

Building international goodwill, such as helping victims of the recent tsunami in Indonesia—with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world— goes a long way toward maintaining national security, he said.

The former president closed with a call to civic duty and asked those in the audience to set aside political labels and to act as “communitarians.”

“You don’t have to be rich; you don’t have to have been president. We can all make a difference, and every time you do something like that, you help us move closer to a win-win world instead of a win-lose world,” Clinton said.

During the question-and-answer portion of the evening, Clinton spoke about the trip he made to North Korea in August to help free Laura Ling and Euna Lee, two American journalists who were being held in the communist country on charges of illegal entry and “hostile” acts.

Clinton said the two women reminded him of his own 25year-old daughter, Chelsea, and that the trip “was a wonderful thing in human terms.”

When asked whether America has seen the worst of the recession, he said some early economic indicators were moving in a positive direction, but he didn’t go so far as to say the U.S. was on the road to recovery.

Clinton said what he was most proud of during his presidency, even more than seeing 8 million people out of poverty and into the middle class, was that Americans were “full of selfconfidence” at the end of his time in office.

“We were full of optimism . . . and we had a sense of possibility,” Clinton said.

Outside the venue, Anna and Richard Gaz weren’t the only two with an opinion of the speech.

“Well, I’m not a Clinton fan, but I thought it was a very good speech,” said Terry Malone, a resident of Woodland Hills. “I can’t find anything he said that I disagreed with. It was very clever and very informative.”

Wendy Lefkowitz of Ventura said she liked the speech.

“I thought it was wonderful that he approached things from a humanitarian and not a political agenda,” she said.

“There’s a lot of food for thought,” said Lee Ambers of Encino. “I would love to hear a debate from somebody else on the other side of the fence . . . so we can get a full picture.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will speak in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 17. The seven-speaker series will also include a March 16 appearance by Dan Rather.