Former Secretarty of State speaks to MU students, public

Former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright held a town hall meeting in Jesse Wrench auditorium in MU’s Memorial Union on September 18. The auditorium was filled to capacity by MU students and the public alike.

The event was hosted by College Democrats and was coordinated by Missouri senior and President of Youth Vote, Kelley Robinson.

For those of you who were too preoccupied with All That! and the Rugrats during the second term of the Clinton administration, Madeline Albright was the first woman Secretary of State. Albright was born in the Czech Republic and emigrated to the United States in 1948. She attended Wellesley College and majored in Political Science. She later earned her Masters and a PhD in Public Law and Government from Columbia University.

But before becoming a permanent United States Representative to the United Nations and Secretary of State, Albright wrote for the social page of a Rolla, Missouri newspaper in 1959. This just goes to show you that one can accomplish incredible things coming from humble beginnings.

Albright is currently a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and is currently a Co-Chair of a prevention of genocide task force with former Secretary of Defense William Cohen.

Albright began the meeting by lauding Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) as “a remarkable leader and exactly what we need for the 21st century” and later describing Biden and Obama as “… a magical combination of judgment, confidence and wisdom.”

But Albright didn’t just use this time to campaign for Obama, she enlightened the crowd as to what foreign policy issues she found most pressing in our day and age, some of her experiences while serving as Secretary of State under the Clinton administration and a few organization she has been involved with since then.

Albright covered five “key umbrella issues” in the meeting, which included: fighting terrorism with out creating more terrorists, dealing with a broken nuclear proliferation regime, the war in Iraq, the negative aspects of globalization, and the environment and energy crisis. Of those five issues, Albright believes the environment and energy crisis to be the biggest issue we face today.
After providing a synopsis of each of her “umbrella issues,” Albright took questions from the crowd ranging from issues she dealt with during the Clinton administration to more current world affairs and the upcoming election.

At a press conference after the meeting, Albright said that she believes that students in a swing state such as Missouri will play a crucial role in deciding the outcome of this presidential election. What impressed me the most about Albright (besides giving an interview in perfect French and then seamlessly switching to back to English) was that she made everyone in the room feel at home, even a couple of brand-new news reporters out on their second assignment of the year.

Albright wasn’t the only notable democrat Columbia played host to during the month of September- Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) spoke at the Hearnes Center on the ninth and Democratic National Committee Chairman Governor Howard Dean’s “Register for Change” campaign came through on the sixth. Biden will be back in Missouri on October 2 to debate with his Republican counterpart , Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, at Washington University in St. Louis.