Former President Bill Clinton came back to his alma mater Oct. 18 to talk about what he sees as the neglect of politics for the common good.

Three weeks before the mid-term elections, Clinton's keynote address at the symposium, "Securing the Common Good: A Vision for American and the World," was a wistful echo of the speeches he made at Georgetown 15 years ago, when he was running for president and outlining his platform of mutual responsibility and equal opportunity.

The symposium was sponsored by the Center for American Progress and Georgetown University.

A 1968 graduate of the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Clinton recalled in his speech what he had learned during his undergraduate years, and how that knowledge conflicts with what he sees in the politics of today.

"I believed then, based on the experiences I had here, that not everyone who disagreed with me was my enemy, that I might be wrong, that as forcefully as I pursued anything I believed in ... I had to always be willing to listen to others," he said. The current political climate, he believes, is one that focuses more on differences and doesn't leave room for healthy debate.

His speeches at the Hilltop in the early 1990s were "what I thought America should do to advance the common good," he told a packed crowd in Gaston Hall. In those days, Clinton often evoked the words of his Georgetown professor, Carroll Quigley, who said that "the defining principle of our culture and our country is future preference, that tomorrow can be better than today and that each of us has a personal and moral responsibility to make it so."

Clinton said his speeches at that time were a "restatement of what our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor to - to form a more perfect union." He characterized his platform then as a "new covenant" to be forged with the American people.

University President John J. DeGioia in his introduction said the latter notion was embedded in Catholic and Jesuit traditions, which include a dedication to community empowerment and promotion of human dignity.

While the concept of "the common good" may seem ambiguous, it's really about attention to common core principles and finding common ground, law professor Neal Katyal said during a panel discussion prior to Clinton's address.

The common good should not be pursued solely by like-minded individuals, Katyal said, it has to be taken on by people of differing beliefs who can learn from one another as they shape new solutions to challenges.

An example of such collaboration is Clinton's recent work on Hurricane Katrina relief with his predecessor, former President George H. W. Bush, and fund raising for 9/11 victims he conducted with his 1996 campaign rival, former Sen. Bob Dole.

"It's not that I want bland, mushy meaningless politics," Clinton said. "We like our debates. The country has been well served by its progressive and by its conservative traditions."

That debate, he said, has been sidelined by individuals who think they already have the answer. These individuals fail to listen to evidence or other views, and are unwilling to consider the consequences of their decisions, he added.

It's the difference between the words "philosophy" and "ideology," Clinton explained.

"If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another," he said. When a person is open to discussion, argument, evidence and new learning, he said that individual may end up making a principled agreement with someone of a different philosophy.

"The problem with ideology," he added, is that "you already have your mind made up. You know all the answers. And that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time. So you tend to govern by assertion and attack."

He gave several recent examples of what he considers to be decisions made contrary to the "common good," including the Bush administration's effort to cut taxes while federal spending continued to increase, particularly for defense. These decisions resulted in a significant increase in the federal deficit, which means that the U.S. government is borrowing more money than ever from foreign entities such as China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, Clinton told the crowd.

He then questioned whether it was "in the interest of the common good" to borrow money from these countries to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

We have to ask "from whom do we get the money and what are the consequences," he told the crowd.

It's not that everyone has to agree on every topic, he said, but there should be a consensus that "we should solve the problem based on what we think is the common good."