It depends on what I inherit to determine what I will be able to do and say and should be saying on the day I sworn in, if that in fact happens. Based on what you see now, would you roll back the re-openings? I am not going to speculate on that, because I do not know what it is going to be. Based on what you see now? Oh, I am sorry, if I were president today, I would roll back the re-openings in a number of places because, look, it is clear mask and social distancing make a gigantic difference in terms of the spread of this disease. We should have circumstances where, in fact, we act responsibly, including in places of work where people are, where they are able to go in and continue to work in terms of social distancing testing and alike. He is done none of that. None of that is part of what he is suggesting. I have laid out in detail what I would do and all the way back in January, when this first came out. Then I did again in March, talked about how I would invoke the Defense Act to require significant stockpiling of PPE. I would also have made sure that we would not have fired the overseers of the folks who determined the allocation of the money that the Congress has allocated so that the inspector generals know where the money's going. I have laid out in detail what I thought he should be doing with regard to the OSHA and the standards that are required for businesses to open. I have laid it all out, and he is followed none of it. How often are you being briefed on the pandemic and who is in charge of keeping you up to date on what is going on? I just went through an 87 page memo with my team, including Vivek Murthy, who you know, and other docs, former heads of the CDC that are part of an entire team that I have, that we put together and go through it at least four times a week. I spent an hour-and-a-half today on the telephone. I mean, excuse me, on what we are doing right now, on camera. Based on what you have heard, a lot of people are concerned about schools, do you think children should be in schools in person while we are waiting on a vaccine to be developed? The question is, will the president do the work he needs to make them safe?


I have laid out a roadmap to reopen schools safely and effectively. Studies show that we need $34 billion to make school safe nationwide. For schools that cannot reopen safely, help them improve the virtual learning. President Trump should stop tweeting and start doing his work. What is key to people feeling safe to go back to work and school is a vaccine. A recent CBS News, UGOV poll found that some 70% of Americans would either wait to get a vaccine and see what happens to other people or not get one at all. That is a huge segment of the population. How then would you secure that every American gets a vaccine as soon as possible considering that distrust? Make it totally open for review by every medical facility in the country, making clear that in fact it is safe, instead of what Trump is talking about. He is talking about all these different vaccines. Much earlier I laid out what would we constitute a business being able to reopen. When I talked about it, I said we should have a circumstance where they were able to meet all the criteria that are recommended by the CDC and others and be able to put on a sticker on their window saying, like a good housekeeping seal, You can come in here because we test, we distance, we do all alike. The fact is that the way he talks about the vaccine is not particularly rational. He is talking it being ready. He is going to talk about moving it quicker than the scientists think it should be moved. Let the medical community writ large speak to it so that there is transparency. Look, I think people are going to, as the poll show and we talked about it today with the two docs and my staff, that in fact people do not believe that he is telling the truth. Therefore, they are not at all certain they are going to take the vaccine. One more thing, if and when the vaccine comes, and it is not likely to go through all the tests that needs and the trials that are needed to be done, and the question is, is he going to seek emergency move? I proposed a $25 billion plan for the distribution to guarantee that every single American has access to the vaccine because what is going to happen, you know as well as I do, if the vaccine came out tomorrow, how in the heck would we get it to people? How would everybody in America have access to it? It is a gigantic, gigantic problem to distribute, even if we have it.

Joe Biden Interview Transcript August 6: Compares Black and Latino Diversity & Faces Criticism


Not when we get it. ENTITY, I'd like to ask you about healthcare because obviously this pandemic has exposed many weaknesses in healthcare. In your platform, you'd extend medical benefits to DACA recipients. But what about the workers who have no protection, specifically farm workers now deemed essential to make Americans sure that they have food on their table? Should undocumented immigrants also be able to get subsidized healthcare? If they are working in the United States of America and they are paying taxes, they should have access to healthcare. They should have access to what everybody else has access to. You say on every undocumented worker. Every person in the country, whether they are undocumented or documented, should have access to a vaccine if and when it occurs, should have access to testing and treatment and hospitalization, if it relates to the virus. It is in the interest of everyone that everyone be taken care of, and everyone should be able to be eligible for that. Just to clarify, you are saying that if you are undocumented, you would be able to get a vaccine for free, subsidized? I'd also like to ask you this, this pandemic has exposed, as I have mentioned, so many weaknesses in the healthcare system. The most vulnerable, often black and brown communities, have been handling much of the financial burden. Before the pandemic, you were against comprehensive single-payer system. Now, if Medicare-For-All came across your desk, as the pandemic has hit so hard, would you veto it? It is not going to come across my desk. But, look, the pandemic has not only torn through our nation, devastating families and wrecking economies, it is exacerbated some of the worst inequities. I am going to fight for health equities, but the quickest way to get that is for black and Latino Americans to have access to the Obamacare with a public option. But has not this pandemic and the tsunami of layoffs shown the limits of private health care that is tied to employment? No, it has not , in my view There is countries that have, in fact, single-payer systems that had not helped them very much either. The question is, what do we do about corralling the pandemic and treating those who are affected by it?


Everyone who is affected by the pandemic has access to free care for anything having to do with that pandemic. Now, some of your most ambitious legislative goals, ENTITY, are likely to face fierce Republican resistance. In fact, President Obama during his eulogy for civil rights icon John Lewis said the way to fully restore the Voting Rights Act is to abolish the Senate filibuster. We are going to be able to do that anyway. I do not think we have to, we are going to be able to do that anyway. Look where we are going to elect at least five to six democratic senators. That still will not get you enough of a super majority- I am pretty good at this. I have done that pretty well my whole career in the United States Senate. The deal is that with President Trump gone and the fear of retribution and his, how can I say it? His ego of following and ruining any Republican who disagrees with him, that is gone. Number two, you are going to see a lot of Republicans, at least a half a dozen of them, beginning to vote their conscience because they no longer have the fear of Trump being there. And thirdly, when we gain control of the United States Senate, which I believe we will on the House, you are going to find people willing to take a vote that was controversial before, because this time it will pass. There is no sense in making the reason why The way human nature works and you all work the same way, if you are going to have to go against the grain of the folks you hang out with in order to vote for something that is not going to pass anyway, you are not going to take the shot. But if you are hanging out with a group of people as against the grain, but you know it is going to pass with your vote, then that is a very different thing. I just do not believe that you are going to have this kind of resistance before, that we had before. And by the way, everybody said, we did not get anything done. After President was elected, after Trump was elected, before he was sworn in, I put together a coalition to Democrats and Republicans to provide for over $9 billion to NIH and almost $2 billion for cancer research. We only had something like a hundred votes for it in the house and we only had something like 36 in the Senate. It passed in January. It passed in late December, before he was sworn in.


Everybody's telling me we cannot get things done. Just to be clear, you do not agree with president Obama that getting rid of the filibuster is necessary. He described it as a relic of Jim Crow. What I said was that if in fact they are as obstreperous as is expected, we'd have to get rid of the filibuster, but the filibuster has also saved a lot of bad things from happening too. I thought I am on record as saying that if the Republicans, if there is no way to move, other than getting rid of the filibuster, that is what we will do. I will jump in ENTITY and ask, as we are talking about elections, the pandemic, as you know, is keeping a lot of people at home and there is a lot of interest in voting by mail, but there has been a lot of comments from President Trump and other Republicans casting doubt on the security of the election system. What should states be doing now to ensure voter confidence in the election? What many of them are doing, voter suppression is what he is trying to make a big deal out of it. There is nothing we are more focused on because frankly, this is the thing that keeps me up most nights, making sure everyone who wants to vote gets to vote, making sure that everyone's vote is counted. And we are going to undertake a historic effort in terms of resources, commitment, to beat back every voter suppression effort and to make sure that the voters know that every legal option available. Our campaign has a strong, effective voter protection and anti voter suppression program. Voter protection campaigns we are putting together for November, meet the unique requirements and challenges that we are facing from this president. No campaign has ever built anything to the scale that we have built to make sure we can get out the vote. We have a major, major dedicated operation in states to address the head on voter suppression and any form of that is going to take and steps we can take to go to court as well. Did you ever think you'd live in a country where you had a President of the United States saying, Let us postpone an election. People see through this. You have five mail in state voting places, two of them overwhelming Republicans. Republicans support mail in voting. We saw with ENTITY has done to elections during the primaries. And we know there are voter suppression problems that have nothing to do with ENTITY.


We are going to be prepared to make sure people have an opportunity to be protected when they show up in person to vote and we are going to have to work with election officials in key cities and battleground states to increase the number of early voting locations and in one recent case, almost double the number of people showed up to vote. In States where the law permits, we are going to be providing voters, absentee ballot request forms, pre paid postage, and the like. We are trying to raise money to be able to do that. The House when they passed the Cares Act, they provided $400 million for a voter to help states improve their voting systems. What is the president doing? He is talking about defunding the post office for God's sake. What more do you need? I am sitting in El Paso, Texas, and it is been one year since a gunman walked into a Walmart and killed 23 people. He told police, he came to kill Mexicans. This is the largest attack on Latinos in modern history. You have accused President Trump of bearing responsibility for the rise in hate crimes. How do you convince white supremacists that minority groups are vital to restore in the soul of America? I do not convince white supremacists. They have to be put in jail when they do things that are inappropriate. White supremacists are not going to be convinced, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not white supremacists. I have been involved in civil rights my whole life and one of the things I thought was that I thought we could really defeat hate. I thought there is a way to defeat it. And when I got out of law school, I came back, my city was in flames. My city was the only city, Wilmington, Delaware, occupied by the National Guard for 10 months since the Civil War, it just had not happened since then. What happened was, I came back, had a good job, decided to leave it, become a public defender. And I used to interview my clients down by the railroad station and here I was 40 years ago later to the month, standing under that same railroad station, waiting for a black man to come and pick me up to take me to Washington DC, be sworn in as President and Vice President of United States. So I called my three children up. My son was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware.


My other son was the head of the world food program USA. And my daughter's a social worker dealing with criminal justice. And so I said, Do not tell me things cannot change, look. I looked over the East side and I said, That was all barren and burned to the ground. And so I thought you could defeat hate. The reason I am running is because of Donald Trump's, what he said when those folks came out of the fields in Charlottesville. And when a president breaths oxygen under the rocks, he pulls them out. He legitimizes them. They make up a significant minority of the American public, but left unattended, they grow, they grow and they cause great damage. And that is why we have to make sure we do a whole range of things. There is a lot of things we are going to do because look, for the first time, you have over 70% of the American people concluding that black lives matter. You have almost as many whites marching with blacks to say, Let us end this systemic racism in America. They are ready because they know we can make significant progress and they know the reason why they have been saved from ENTITY is because of the Latino and black communities have been doing all the hard work. You got thousands of DACA students out there doing the mainline work and making sure that people are safe. You have all kinds of folks, the woman making sure she is stacking the grocery shelf to make sure we have food to eat. The farm worker, you talked about ma'am, but was making sure we have the food to get in the table. They have figured it out. And we have a confluence of three things that have happened, that are going to give us an enormous opportunity to change the dynamic in America. We can now move in a direction. That is why I put this Build Back Better plan together, focusing the last, the last piece on racial equity. We can do this. ENTITY, I want to follow up on your point to Alfredo's question that white supremacists cannot be convinced. You just said there that the extreme right wing folks in the country left unattended, will grow. Should not there be some sentiment to reach out to people who hold racist views to convince them otherwise? That is different than the white Look, you are talking about white supremacists.


I thought you were talking about the people like the kid who showed up in El Paso and gunned down all those innocent people. That is what we are talking about. The Klu Klux Klan and the like, the white supremacists, those who belong to those groups, they are a minority. I am reaching out to everyone else. I have done it my whole career. My state is the eighth largest black population in the United States of America as a percent of population. That is what I have been working with my whole career. And you can deal with those who, in fact, are prejudice. A lot of prejudice out there, but not everyone's a white supremacist, like the kid who went in and gunned down those folks in El Paso. Now, you have apologized for your role in the 1994 Crime Bill that created the Three Strikes Law, expanded the list of crimes punishable by death. What will you do now to make up for what you have described as the pain brought by that bill, that many people still feel today? Well, let us get something straight. The bill at the time it was passed, was overwhelmingly passed with every major black mayor in America. The black caucus supported it and violent crime against African Americans, fell by 57%. It had things in it that I did not like at all, like three strikes and you are out, which I argued against. It also had some very good things in it; assault weapons ban, drug courts, it made sure that we were in a position where we were going to focus on dealing with rehabilitation. One third of it went to prevention, one third to rehabilitation, all of those things they in fact made sense. On balanced the whole bill, there were only three provisions that were really bad. And two, the idea that carjacking was a mandatory minimum penalty, if you were convicted of it and three, money for state prisons, all three of which I opposed. But on balance, it was a much, much, much better bill. And so now we face a different problem. We have too many people in prison. That is why President Obama and I reduced the federal population by 38,000. Of all the people in prison today, 93% are behind a bar in a state prison, a county jail and or a city jail. As we passed the Fair Sentencing Act, to reduce sentences related to crack cocaine.


I am running on a plan to reform the criminal justice system so we can fix it. No one should go to jail for a drug offense, for example, which I have argued for a long time. They should go to mandatory treatment. We automatically wipe out anyone's record for using marijuana. Once people get out of the system, all their rights should be restored, including the Pell Grants and voting rights and access to housing. We also have to expand the power of the justice department to adjust systemic misconduct by police departments and prosecutors and establish an independent taskforce on prosecutorial discretion. That is what I have been pushing. The city of Asheville, North Carolina recently approved what they call reparations to their African American community in the form of home ownership, affordable housing and access to capital for businesses. My question for you is, do you think the American government owes black people reparations and what form, if so, should it take? I think the studies suggested by my friend, Cory Booker, should be followed through and seen. In the meantime, we cannot wait. Meantime, we cannot wait. If you take a look at my Bill Back Better plan, which you probably have not had a chance to read, it does all the things that Asheville just did. It provides for a down payment, first time down payment of $15,000 for black Americans and Hispanic Americans seeking housing and invest significantly more money in public housing, we used to call it public housing, subsidized rental. Nobody should be paying more than 30% of their income for rent. It fundamentally alters access to capital across the board for small businesses. We have already 400,000 black, small business gone out of business. They should be at the front of the line. I propose that we take the program Barack and I put together that said that there is 1,000,000,005 that brought $3 billion off the sidelines for entrepreneurs, black entrepreneurs and has chased that to- If I may, you rolled out a plan this week for Latinos. My first question is what took you so long to come up with a plan for the largest minority group in the country? And this plan talks a lot about the urgent actions. What is at the top of that list. Well, first of all, everything in that plan, I have already said over the last year and a half, we just packaged it together. Number one, the most urgent thing is to fix the


First of all, every executive order this president has issued relating to the border and relating to dealing with the Hispanic community is going to be pulled back. We are not going to be fooling with that here. First thing I am going to do and I have already written, sent to the United States Congress a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented folks. And you are going to be put on a path to citizenship. We are going to invest in economic mobility, invest in wealth inside Latino communities especially Latino businesses, and ensuring Latinos have access to credit and capital by providing Latino businesses access to participate in federal contracts and critical assistance programs, ensuring economic relief reaches Latino businesses. That is what my whole plan about manufacturing the United States and dealing with all the public money being spent under the control of the president. That is one that will in fact be available, those contracts and that chain, that supply chain for manufacturing is owned by many small business people, Latinos, as well as African Americans and other minorities. We are going to expand that. I am going to finish this answer. And the last piece is we are going to tackle the inequities in education. That is why I am tripling the money for title one schools, providing university and pre-kindergarten all across the board. We are going to expand STEM curricula. We are going to deal with underserved schools, and we are going to make sure that anyone who comes from a family making less than $125,000 has free access to four years of public education college. I have a few questions that I'd just like to get through because they are incredibly important to the Latino community. First of all, you are extending TPS, temporary protected status, to Venezuelans. Cubans though, are now being deported in unprecedented numbers. Would you stop those deportations? What I said, I am going to look at every single country in the world that in fact is being and this guy's sending them back. The reason why I came up with Venezuela is he not even allowing it to exist in the first place. And so the TPS program is something I will move on the first day I am in office to make sure that we extend it to people. I think that we should be extending it. Anybody can prove that they are in jeopardy to go back to their country and the reason they came in the first place. They should be able to stay in the United States of America until the circumstance changes in our country.


And that is why, by the way, I put that program together to provide Oh, go ahead. Are you going to reengage with Cuba though? I mean, I am specifically wondering about the Florida communities that are incredibly interested in the Cuba issue and see status given to Venezuelans while Cubans are being deported. So will you engage with Cuba? And by the way, what you all know, but most people do not know, unlike the African American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things. You go to Florida, you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you are in Arizona. So president Obama was known as the deporter in chief from moving more than 3 million people during the Biden Obama administration. Trump campaigned to build that wall. Trump campaigned on build that wall. Are you willing to tear that wall down? Number two, what I am going to focus on and the fact is that somebody in this group written a lot about the border. I am going to make sure that we have border protection, but it is going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it and at the ports of entry. We are not going to confiscate the land. ENTITY, under the Trump administration, asylum has virtually ended. Your new plan calls for reversing President Trump's harsh plan, but will not that restart a brand new border crisis? I mean, what would you do with all those people in camps now waiting in Mexico? It will if we do not do it well, we do not reach out to the charitable communities that will come in and help, and in addition to us spending millions of dollars providing for access, access for judges, access for asylum folks to be on the border to move quickly . I have withdrawn the order. You are going to have a crisis on the other side of the border as well. And we should not be putting these people when they come across the border in jail. We should be doing monitoring. Number one, but we have to make sure that we build up the infrastructure to be able to accommodate Trump's cruel, inhumane border policies, ripping children from their mother's arms and Trump's migrant protection protocols, remain in Mexico program.


I mean, all of this is going to take time, not a long time, but you have to be prepared so we do not create another crisis as you pointed out. What are you trying the Department of Homeland Security? I will have someone heading that department that listens to what we say. And by the way, ICE is going to go back to school. The idea that ICE is sitting outside of a mass on Sunday to arrest a parent coming out as undocumented, the idea that they are going to schools, the idea they are going to doctor's appointments is wrong. This is about families. And you have so many young children, so many young children under enormous pressure and psychological pressure, wondering whether or not they are going to come home there is going to be no one there. We need to do so much more. From my perspective, it is all about families. We have to push humanitarian resources to make sure that we have public private partnerships to support people living in these conditions. We have got to surge resources for the asylum protectors. It is going to cost a lot of money and I have been calling for it for a year and a half. Are those asylum seekers that are on the other side of the border now in camps going to be allowed to come and do their claims inside the United States, something that has not been reported to them? Otherwise, if I just say, Tomorrow, everybody comes across the border. You have had to seek asylum in a third country. ENTITY, your opponent in this election, President Trump, has made your mental state a campaign topic. And when asked in June, if you'd been tested full cognitive decline, you have responded that you are constantly tested in effect because you are in situations like this on the campaign trail. But please clarify specifically, have you taken a cognitive test? No, I have not taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? That is like saying, Before you got in this program, if you take a test where you are taking cocaine or not. What do you think? What do you say to President Trump who brags about his test and makes you a message say an issue for voters? Well, if he cannot figure out the difference between an elephant and a lion, I do not know what the hell he is talking about. Did you watch that?


I know you are trying to goad me, but I mean, I am so forward-looking to have an opportunity to sit with the President or stand with the President in debates. And by the way, as I joke with him I should not say it. I am going to say something I probably should not say. Anyway, I am very willing to let the American public judge my physical as well as my mental fitness and to make a judgment about who I am and what state of affairs I have, what kind of physical shape I am in, what kind of mental shape I am in. Someone who is on your VP shortlist, Senator Kamala Harris, told NPR last year that the Justice Department would have no choice, but to prosecute Trump after his presidency. Should you win, would you follow through on the many investigations? Could you envision him, a former president, being prosecuted if the evidence shows wrongdoing? I will not interfere with the Justice Department's judgment of whether or not they think they should pursue the prosecution of anyone that they think has violated the law- I think it is a very, very unusual thing and probably not very How can I say it? Good for democracy to be talking about prosecuting former presidents. What is the bar to you to have to- I do not know what some of these cases going on in the New York courts are. I do not know the detail of those cases. And so if there is a case underway that in fact has to be pursued and I believe it should be pursued and the attorney general thinks it is, that is a very different thing. But in terms of saying, I think the President violated the law. I think the President did this, therefore go and prosecute him. I will not do that. I do not think anyone's above the law. And I love the way you are trying to get me into this thing about lock them up. I mean, the Southern District of New York just said that their extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump organization that they are looking into. I said, those things that are underway, if they prove to be a criminal offense, then in fact that would be up to the attorney general to decide whether he or she want to proceed with it. I am not going to make that individual judgment. ENTITY, I want to go back to voting rights. some States that are engaging in voter suppression.


And my question is if you were to become President, is there anything you have considered taking executive action in order to shore up voting systems or protect voting rights for American public without waiting for congressional approval or a bill to pass? Well, the answer is I'd do what Barack and I did in our administration, the Attorney General would go after, there are somewhere about 84, 85 attempts that have been made and I think it is 31 States, do not hold me to the exact number, to suppress voting, to make it harder to vote. And I would take those systems, and those I'd challenge in court, those attempts, those new attempts at Jim Crow. I would do that. I would have the Attorney General go out and make sure that we have, and the first thing I am going to do in terms of the Justice Department, I was the guy who got the Voting Rights Act extended for 25 years. And along came the Shelby case and Shelby County in Alabama and the court came along and said, There is no longer a requirement that you have get pre-clearance because of the conduct in the past. So any change you wish to make an electoral process, you have to check through the courts. They said that is old, but they cannot do that. There is no constitutional prohibition to change the provision in the law, I think it is section four, I am not positive, to change that provision to say they require pre-clearance under certain conditions, that requires a vote in the United States Congress that is now called, that is now the Lewis amendment to the Voting Rights Act. And that is what I pushed very hard and I have been pushing it for a long time. We just want to get in just one question in the international sphere, President Trump is not the first President to say China is ripping off the United States. President Obama made similar complaints. Some have said Trump's stance is a good one to counter China's influence. Would you keep the tariffs? Manufacturing has gone on recession. Agriculture lost billions of dollars that taxpayers had to pay. We are going after China in the wrong way. China is stealing intellectual property. China's conditioning being able to do business in China based on whether or not you have 51% Chinese ownership. I spent a fair amount of time when I was Vice President with President Xi, because the President wanted me to get to know him.


He is no Democrat with a small D at all, but here is the deal, he made it real clear, he- So he scrapped those tariffs, what do you want in return? Or you are just going to scrap them without any concessions? The question is what is the appropriate behavior that they have to engage in international trade with us and they have to play by the international rules. And what we have done is we have disarmed ourselves. We make up 25% of the world's economy, but we poked our finger in the eye of all of our allies out there. The way China will respond is when we gather the rest of the world that in fact invasion and open trade and making sure that we are in a position that we deal with WHO the right way, in fact, that is when things began to change. For example, when I was last there, he said to me, Xi, that they set up an error identification zone that they had an international airspace that said that you had to check with China before you could fly through it. I said, We are not going to pay attention. He said, What do you want me to do? I said, You should, but we are not going to pay attention. So we flew B-1 bomber through it. We have got to make it clear, the international rules of the road in terms of airspace, sea space, and the way in which you deal with the trade and equity that have to be imposed. And what we did in our administration, when they started dumping steel, we responded. They just overproduced and they just started dumping steel through the state owned entities. They also did the same thing with tires. And so you respond under the rules, the international rules of trade and hold them to it. That is what you do. And just as we run out of time here, Mr. Vice-President, how would you confront China on the alleged human rights abuses, not just toward Hong Kong, but toward Uyghur Muslims, as well, beyond these newly announced Senate sanctions? You may recall, I was the first one to say, we should act and go to the United Nations with the Uyghurs. I believe the first one, period. We should be in the United Nations condemning China's action.


And look what happened when he did not respond to what was going on in Hong Kong, it emboldened China does just to go ahead and break what had been an agreement they had made about the quasi independence of Hong Kong. And so now we are taking action relative to Hong Kong, but look, folks, you have to speak up. He has no conception of human rights. The way he is embraced dictators and thugs around the world. The way he is failed to take on Putin in terms of what is going on in Afghanistan, what is going on in Ukraine, what is going on in Eastern Europe. Look, this is a man who is embraced all the wrong people, all the wrong people. And he treats NATO like it is a protection racket. So I just think that this is we get to say, China, these are the international rules of the road. You play by them, or we are not playing. Now what we most have to do, excuse me. What is most is we have invest in our own people. We used to invest nationally about two to 3% of our GDP in technology as a government. It is now down to 0.3, if I am not mistaken, could be 0.4%. What are we doing? What in God's name are we doing? They are going to own the 5G market, they are making sure they are focusing extensively on IT. And we are doing what? What are we doing? Trump continues to focus on all those industries that are obsolete in America. We should be investing in made in America and make sure that our workers can out compete anybody in the world, anybody in the world, but what are we doing? We are not focused on it. Sir you had a question. I know we have to go and I have another event, but fire away. I wanted to thank you for your time, ENTITY. And wondering if you have any closing remarks for the membership of NABJ, NAFJ, people who are watching this interview right now? Well, first of all, I just want to thank especially want to thank President Tucker and Hugo, as he referred to the President for the leadership and inviting me to join you today. Look, I want to thank you for all the work you do by strengthening diversity in our press, strengthening quality and capacity of the press and is broadening our perspective and deepening our connection with each other. We need that more now than ever.


We need people who know about it, especially at a time when black and Latino reporters have been targeted by this President for asking questions, honest questions, and condemn for standing strong and for doing their job. Look, America's facing a confluence of crisis and immeasurable pain, but we are also facing an incredible opportunity. It is an opportunity to right a wrong that has festered since our founding fathers. The fact is black and Latino Americans have never been fully included in our democracy or our economy. It seeps into everything. I have said it already, in the course of this pandemic, black and Latinos Americans have been three times as likely to get infected and twice as likely to die. Black and Latino Americans are disproportionately out of work, facing evictions, losing hope. The communities are the first ones to get hit and the last ones to get any relief. We need overwhelming response to right that wrong. I am proud of the sweeping plan I put together to build back better, including everyone in the deal. It is long past time we deal with systemic racism in America and deliver black and Latino Americans their full share of the American dream. Every one of us has a role to play in that work. So I want to thank you for shining a light on all of this and the work you do, and the stories you communicate because you have great credibility in the people you communicate to, it matters a great deal. And folks, I know you may not agree, but I honest to God think we have been delivered to one of those inflection points in American history that has not occurred since the '30s, where the public has had the blinders taken off and they have looked around and said, Oh my God, I did not realize it. I am convinced, and I am also emboldened by the younger generation, the generation Z to the young millennials. They are the best educated, the least prejudiced, the most open generation in American history. I will just say one last thing. When you have roughly 24 out of every 100 students in kindergarten through high school that speaks Spanish, how in God's name does it make any sense for any other American to say there is nothing we should do more than make sure they are fully integrated, educated, and grow? It is the future of the country. And the idea we walk away makes no sense.


Well, you are in a good mood right now, but on the trail you seemed a little... there is a little edge. There is a little tone of frustration and one of your friends told me that you are deeply frustrated and worried about the economy. You know, you swim in this economic data. How concerned are you and how worried should people be that we might be that we might be heading into a double dip? Even if we do not go into a double dip, what I feel is what the American people feel, which is that we have now gone through not only two-and-a-half, three years of post recession blues where housing crashed. People have lost the value of their homes, they have lost their jobs, all the struggles and strains that people are going through every day, but even before the crisis the hit, for a decade, people have seen their wages flat line, their incomes flat line. So, yes, there is an enormous sense on my part that not only do we have to solve the immediate problems that the economy faces, but we have got to get this economy on a stronger foundation. If you hear a sense of urgency in my voice, it is because these problems are solvable, but you do not get a sense that we are moving in Washington with a sense of urgency that is required. I am not worried in the sense that I do not think we can solve these problems. The jobs plan that I put forward, we know that it will grow the economy by as much as 2 percent. We know that it could add as many as 1.9 million jobs. We can put teachers back in the classroom. We can put construction workers back on the job rebuilding our roads, bridges and schools. I am not worried about the long term prospects of this economy because we still have the best universities in the world, the best workers in the world. We have got the best entrepreneurs and the best market system in the world, but I am concerned that right now, things in Washington are broken. It seems as if too many folks are willing to put politics ahead of what is required and making the tough choices whether that is reducing deficit, whether it is putting people back to work, whether it is making investments that are necessary for us to become competitive, you do not get a sense of people all pulling together in the same direction. And that is what is going to be required to some very significant challenges.

Interview With Jake Tapper on ABC News Nightline


You have gotten a lot passed though, much of your agenda has been passed the stimulus, health care, Wall Street reform so we are sitting in a state right now where a majority of the voters disapprove of your handling of the economy and we are going to Virginia later, where a majority of the voters do not thing you deserve to be re-elected. We are sitting in a school, what grade would you give yourself? Well, you know I am not going to give myself a grade. Other than incomplete because the work that we started is not yet done, but the fact is that the American people are rightly frustrated over what they see as a system in which responsibility is not always rewarded, where people who have done the right thing all their lives still seem to be struggling, that sense that the American dream is slipping away. I think that is something that helped get me elected but it has not been entirely solved yet, and in some ways it is gotten tougher for folks because of the financial crisis. And I think most people understand that we did not get into this problem overnight and we are not going to solve it overnight, but I think that after two-and-a-half, three years of elevated unemployment, home values declining substantially, people feeling as if everything they have worked for is still leaving them vulnerable and not having the security they have counted on, it is not surprising that people are feeling frustrated and as ENTITY of the United States, even though they do not think I caused the problem, they are still going to feel a justifiable impatience in terms of why are not we able to get this in a better place. What I say to the American people is that we are moving in the right direction, it is going to take time to heal all the problems that exist out there, the health care bill that we passed is absolutely the right thing to do but it is going to take awhile before it is even fully implemented, much less taken full effect, and you start seeing health care inflation stabilize. When it comes to education we are doing great reforms at the elementary and secondary levels but it could take 10 years before we start seeing the full effects of education reform taking place. That is why the jobs bill is so important because even as we are doing these structural reforms that put us in a stronger position in the long terms, we still have to help people now and the most important thing we can do right now is to make sure we are putting people back to work.


Some of the frustration that has come out in this 'Occupy Wall Street' protest, you have expressed sympathy with their position, with their feeling of powerlessness. First of all, how do you, as ENTITY of the United States, channel an energy and anger that is aimed at you in some ways, aimed at Washington? And the other question I have is it seems as though sometimes your pitch, or the White House pitch, is you are almost a victim in this. You are not responsible when you have gotten so much past. I just wonder if you think that is effective to say, it is those mean Republicans who are blocking me, when you have really gotten a lot done? Well what we have gotten done I am enormously proud of and it is making a difference, and in some cases we have had a chance to actually work with the Republicans. When they show themselves willing to actually engage to try and get stuff done, then we can do a lot of good for the country. We just signed a series of trade agreements that potentially can create tens of thousands of jobs throughout this country so that we are starting to sell cars in South Korea and not just buy cars from South Korea. We just passed a bill to reform our patent system so our entrepreneurs are able to make sure that they are rewarded for the great ideas that they have and get them to market quicker. So wherever we can find areas of common cause, I am ready and willing to work with them right away. But I do not say that we are victimized, I say that we got too little of the kind of let us work together attitude in Washington that we need, and that has been true since I came into office. And that is just a fact, that the truth of the matter is that on a series of very important measures that could make a big difference, the most prominent being right now is putting people back to work, rebuilding our infrastructure, getting teachers back in the classroom, we have not seen that attitude of cooperation that is necessary. The fact of the matter is, in the absence of some Republican support, they are able to block proposals even if they have gotten the support of the majority of American people. Sixty-three percent of the American people support the elements of my jobs plan, they support the idea that we should have the best infrastructure in the world. They support the idea that we should not be firing teachers at time when we know education is the most important thing we can do to make sure our kids can compete in this economy.


And yet, even though we have gotten a majority of senators in the Senate willing to move forward on this, because of the filibuster, because of the rules that are set up in the Senate, those things are blocked. And most prominently on the debt ceiling debacle that we just went through, everybody knows that we are going to have to get our deficit under control, but we have to do it in a way that allows us still to invest. What I have said is I am willing to go beyond the one trillion dollars in cuts that we have already made, we can cut programs that do not make sense, curb government spending but in order to close the deficit, people like myself should also pay a little more in taxes. People who are making a million dollars or more can afford to do a little bit more, and that ideological stubbornness that is unwilling to compromise and create a balanced approach to deficit reduction is another example of why people are so frustrated. You asked earlier about Occupy Wall Street and what I have said is that I understand the frustrations that are being expressed in those protests. In some ways, they are not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party, both on the left and the right. I think people feel separated from their government, that the institutions are not looking out for them and that the most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership, letting people know that we understand their struggles, we are on their side and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you are supposed to do, is rewarded, and that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who do not feel a sense of obligation to their communities and to their companies and to their workers, that those folks are not rewarded. You know, I think that we are at a critical moment in this country where if we can regain some of the values that help build this country, that people I think long for, where they feel that everybody gets a fair shake but we are also asking a fair share from everybody, but if we can go back to that, then I think a lot of that anger and frustration dissipates. It is just over two months until the Republican Iowa caucus. I do not know if you are watching the debates, but I am sure you are reading about them in the paper. Herman Cain has his 9-9-9 plan.


What are you hearing from the Republicans when it comes to the economy? What do you think of their proposals? I have got to say, what I have not heard is anything new, across the board, whether it is coming from Congress or from the Republican candidates so far. Well, essentially what it says is that we are going to make sure that the wealthiest among us pay less and we replace any revenues with a sales tax that would be a huge burden on middle class families and working families. I remember a candidate who ran against me, Alan Keyes who was running against me in the Senate, had a similar kind of proposal. Those ideas have been have been floating around for a long time. The overall thrust seems to be if we roll back regulations, and we lower taxes on those who are doing best, oftentimes by imposing more taxes on middle class and working class families, that somehow the economy is going to get better. One of the things I am most surprised about is hearing both from Republican members of Congress and Republican candidates, the notion that we should return to the rules that existed on Wall Street before the financial crisis. They want to roll back all the Wall Street reforms we put into place as if they have got amnesia about how we got into this problem in the first place. We have set up, for example, under Wall Street reform a consumer advocate, a consumer protection board that, whose sole job is to make sure people are not being taken advantage of when it comes to their credit cards or their mortgages, making sure that in their financial dealings they are being treated fairly and transparently. And right now, the Republicans have said they are not even going to confirm a consumer advocate, a consumer watchdog that we have nominated, Rich Cordray. You are going to talk a lot more about this in the coming days? Absolutely, because I think whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, if you are an ordinary guy out there who seen what is happened on Wall Street, whose seen what is happened in the financial system, one thing you at least expect is that we are going to curb some of the reckless behavior that damaged the entire economy so profoundly. And the notion that the Senate Republicans put forward what they call a jobs plan was one of their central tenants was we are going to roll back Wall Street reform and go back to the same rules that got us in this in the first place. I do not think that is going to find a lot of sympathy from the American people.


Your senior political advisor David Axelrod has spent a lot of time in the last month talking about Mitt Romney. I genuinely am not spending a lot of time worrying about who their candidate is going to be. I am not asking if you are worried about it. I am asking if you are thinking about it. I guess what I am saying is I saw in my own presidential race, and I have seen enough presidential races that people are surprised that it does not make sense for me to prognosticate on what I think is going to happen on their side. They are going to go through a process. We have already seen people who get enormous attention suddenly go by the wayside. They will go through the process and sometime next year they will have a nominee. What I am certain of, though, is that there is going to be a very clear contrast between whoever they nominate and their vision of where we should take the country and where I believe we should take the country. I think that on a whole host of issues, whether it is Wall Street reform, whether it is that we are investing in education or rebuilding our infrastructure, whether it is how we approach reducing our deficit. Are we going to do it in a balanced way or are we going to do it on the backs of our seniors or the middle class or the poor? On a whole range of these issues, there is going to be a clear choice for the American people to make. I guarantee it is going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be and even though I believe all the choices we have made have been the right ones, we are still going through difficult circumstances. That means people who may be sympathetic to my point of view still kind of feel like, yeah, but it still has not gotten done yet. This is going to be a close election and a very important one for the American people. The thing I hope the most is that everyone is going to be paying close attention to the debate that takes place because it could determine not just what happens over the next four years, but what'll happen over the next 20 or 30 years. 47 percent of the country voted against you with everything going your way, pretty much. It is not difficult to think that there are four million Americans who thought well, I gave him a shot. Let us give this other guy another chance.


I think someone asked me a while back if they thought I was the underdog and I said I was in 2008 and I think will be in 2012. You know, presidential elections in America are always tough because this is a country that is diverse. We have a lot of folks who feel very strongly on one side of the ledger or the other, but the thing I am spending most of my time thinking about right now is how can I put people to work right now and how can I improve the economy right now and stabilize it. The election is 13 months away and as I have been saying in some of my remarks as I travel around the country, there are a lot of folks living paycheck to paycheck, living day to day. They cannot afford just 13 months of politics. What they need is action. So, if we can put of these construction workers back to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and schools, if we can get teachers back in the classroom, we can provide some tax breaks to small businesses who are hiring veterans or long-term unemployed. I have no idea what that does for the politics of the presidential election, I do know that there will be an awful lot of people out here doing better and are in a stronger position to dig themselves out of this very difficult economic circumstance we have been in. Aside from some of the more wild charges out there, this is a big scandal. The Justice Department, the ATF was moving guns and some of them were tied to crime scenes. what was your response when you first heard about it? Well I heard about it from the news reports. This is not something we were aware of in the White House and the Attorney General it turns out was not aware of either. Obviously Eric Holder has launched a full investigation of this, it is not acceptable for us to allow guns to go into Mexico. Our whole goal has been to interdict aggressively in the flow of weapons and cash flowing south into Mexico because the Mexican president, President Calderon, has done a heroic job of trying to take on these transnational drug cartels. So this investigation will be complete, people who have screwed up will be held accountable but our overarching goal consistently has been to say we have got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we have also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico.


I have got to tell you something, sir. I have been waiting a long time on getting you on this program. I even went down for the big old ENTITY watch when you were over on the Vineyard this summer, and I am sorry I missed you. So let us talk about a couple of things. First of all, you need to know that all the kids over at Framingham High are looking forward to your coming down with Senator Kennedy. And let us talk about this education bill. Even Jack Anderson is calling you the education ENTITY. Well, we have worked very hard on education, and Senator Kennedy has had a lot to do with it. A lot of our education initiatives have not attracted a great deal of public notice, maybe because we have been successful in getting bipartisan support for them, for most of them, all but the college loan program. The program to provide middle class college loans at lower interest rates had no Republican support because we took on some organized interest groups. And it is a real tribute to Ted Kennedy because he got the expansion of Head Start in, he got the national service program in. And this education act we are signing in Boston tomorrow, or in Framingham, has an incredible amount of good things in it. It is a dramatic reform in terms of putting more responsibility back on local school districts, giving them freedom from Federal rules and regulations but giving them very high standards to shoot for. It is a really it is a very modern, exciting, and I think, effective piece of education legislation. I am proud to be signing it. Well, you know, ENTITY, Senator Kennedy is not only delighted to have you here signing that particular bill, but as you know, this is the toughest race the Senator has ever faced in 32 years. And for many of us in Massachusetts, we are surprised to know that nationally he is one of several seats that we are looking at that could be in very serious jeopardy. Your coming out here to help him will be bringing a message to Massachusetts voters that says what? How important is Senator Kennedy and his reelection to the completion of your agenda as you go back to Washington? He is terribly important to doing it. And he is important for some reasons that people, I think, may not be aware of in Massachusetts. I mean, the rap that his critics are saying is that, Well, he is been there long enough.

Interview With Marjorie Clapprood of WRKO Radio, Boston, Massachusetts


But I can tell you, I have been talking around here the last week, just asking people, and there is a general feeling here that of all the people in the Congress, Ted Kennedy is one of the four or five who are most receptive to new ideas, to trying new things, to breaking out in new directions. And if you just look at what we have done in education, we have changed the whole national approach to education. Have national standards, have the National Government helping, but give people the freedom at the grassroots level to try new things and to do things that will work. And he is also been instrumental in developing a national apprenticeship program for young people who do not go to college and, as I said, this college loan program. We have had the most impressive set of achievements in the last year and a half in education we have seen in the last 35 years, a lot of cutting-edge, new ideas, and Ted Kennedy has done it. The other thing he is very good at that I think people do not appreciate is he is the best Democratic legislator at getting Republicans to support what he is doing. He is the best at getting bipartisan support. And I think that if the people of Massachusetts know that, they would be more inclined to reelect him, because he is really a very forward-looking Member of the Congress, and we need him back. Well, one of the things that the First Lady said when she was in a couple of weeks back I was happy to be at the dinner that she hosted for the Senator she went so far as to say that Senator Kennedy's opponent, Mitt Romney, is really just another clone for Phil Gramm and another Senator no for you. Are you as worried about that? Do you want to make any predictions on all of these GOP threats that they are going to be taking over the Senate and taking over the Congress this time around? Well, I do not think they will if we can get the facts out there. I mean, we have made the Government work for ordinary Americans. We have passed things like family leave and the Brady bill and immunizations for all the kids in this country under 2, against ferocious Republican opposition. We have got more highwage jobs coming into the economy in 1994 than the previous 5 years combined. If we can get the record out, we should be winning seats, not them.


But the problem is that they are great talkers, and they promise the Moon, and they will go like robots off of a cliff together. And that is what I am worried about. It is no offense to Mr. Romney, but they all in the last few days of the legislative session up here, we had an important piece of environmental legislation, the Superfund bill to clean up toxic waste dumps. Everybody in America was for it. We had the chemical companies, the unions, the Sierra Club; they were all for it first time they had ever agreed on anything. There was no one in America against it except over 40 Republican Senators who filibustered it to death to keep people like Ted Kennedy from coming back to Massachusetts and saying we helped to clean up toxic waste dumps. They were willing to leave the poison in the ground. They killed lobby reform and campaign finance reform. And all the lobbyists were cheering Senator Helms when he walked off the floor of the Senate and saying how great it was. Now, I do not think the American people want to turn the Congress over to them. And especially, I do not think they want to go back to trickle-down Reaganomics. That is what they have promised to do, you know. They have promised to give us the economic policies that they did in the eighties that put New England in the ditch. And I do not think that the people will support it once they know that. Well, you know, one of the things that I loved about your campaign, ENTITY, was the slogan It is the economy, stupid. And it seems as though, with all the indicators macroeconomically looking so terrific what is the deal with cynical voters? I mean, how do we get this message out? It seems to me that you cannot win for losing, even when everything looks good. And that is that we have had 20 years when most wages have been stagnant for hourly wage earners and when people have been changing jobs more frequently, so that makes them more insecure. The average 18-year-old, for example, will change jobs six, seven times in a lifetime now. So even though people may say the unemployment rate is dropping and new jobs are coming into America, into Massachusetts, there is still an unsettled feeling. A lot of people themselves have not gotten a raise. A million Americans lost their health insurance last year; that is why we have to address that.


Then there is a political problem, which is that when Congress is in session, particularly with the bitter partisan obstruction we have seen, what tends to get covered is the fights, the bad news, the failures, the process. So a lot of people just do not know the facts about the economy. So what I am going out to do now, in the last 3 weeks, is to say, Look, we are making Government work for ordinary people. We are bringing the economy back. The world is a more peaceful, more secure place for Americans, with opportunities for prosperity. We should be very upbeat about the future, and we ought to reward the people that are building the future, not reward the people that are tearing it down. Do you have any further comments, other than those that you made on KMOX, about talk radio? Do you think that the right-wing conservative bashing of talk radio has done a disservice? It seems to me that is the national pastime of a lot of my colleagues on the air; that is just the get good ratings if you kick Bill around. Me. Oh, I like you. But generally, I like radio because it is an immediate, it is almost an intimate thing. And people feel that they have a chance to have their say. But a lot of these folks who are on the far right, they never have anybody on that disagrees with them, they never have an honest discussion, and they are not as careful as they ought to be with their facts. I think it is good to have your critics on there and to have honest debates. We should not all agree on everything, and no one in America, including the ENTITY, is right about everything. But what I think the American people ought to insist on from talk radio is a conversation, not a screaming match, and strict adherence to the facts. That is the only thing that bothers me. I think generally this talk radio phenomenon can be a great instrument in promoting democracy. People feel so isolated from Washington, so isolated from the bureaucracies. A lot of folks even feel isolated from their State capital. So if talk radio makes people feel like they have got a voice, they can be heard, then that is good. And I have got this big problem my mother always said to me, a position that is not articulated ceases to exist. I agree with that. I wanted to ask you a little bit about international affairs, if we can.


Coming on the heels now of what looks like a fairly peaceful transition and return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti, you have got an awful lot on your international plate, with the Middle East, with what is happening in Kuwait, and I understand you are on your way next week to the signing of the peace accord between Israel and Jordan. Do you feel as though you have turned a major corner in your administration in terms of not only the maturity of the ENTITY administration but in public perception finally cutting you a break and saying, You know what, he is doing all right ? I think, first of all, a lot of these problems are very difficult, and they do not yield overnight. And a lot of them are things we have been working on here for 2 years. But I am very proud of what our people, particularly our young men and women in uniform, have done in Haiti and in the Persian Gulf. I am proud of the role the United States is playing toward peace in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland. And I am very proud of the work that Ambassador Gallucci did in hammering out this agreement with the North Koreans, which will enable us to avoid a confrontation with them, and enable them to move toward a more normal relationship with South Korea and with the rest of the world, and take a major nuclear threat away. But I am feeling good about it. getting our relationship straight with the Russians and reducing the nuclear threat in that part of the world, and toward getting an international economic order set up. We worked on NAFTA, the Asian Pacific countries, the GATT world trade agreement. And then this year, we had some good success, as you have pointed out, in Haiti and the Middle East and elsewhere. And I am very excited, as I know a lot of people in Massachusetts are, about the moves toward peace in Northern Ireland. And we are working hard on that as well. You do not even have time to go bowling anymore. I miss bowling. By the way, I know I heard on your birthday one of your wishes was to break 80. Did you ever do that?  I am playing pretty well, for me. And if I lowered my handicap when I was ENTITY, the American people would never believe that I am working as hard as I am. So I probably should not want to break 80. It makes you very charming and endearing, because the rest of us can all relate to that. Let me ask you just a couple wacky questions.


The thing that I remember most about you from the first time that I heard about the Governor from Arkansas that wanted to be ENTITY was a picture I saw of you with then-ENTITY John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a personal hero of mine but also someone here from Massachusetts. And I grew up in his hometown of Brookline. And I saw that picture recently on sort of a retrospective of your tenure over this last year and half as ENTITY. And I wondered, from that idealistic young man that you were, to now sitting in the Oval Office and dealing with questions like sending the 82d Airborne down to Haiti while Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell sat there, making decisions on war and peace, is it everything that you thought it was going to be? I mean, if anything, I am more hopeful, more optimistic about the future of this country than I was before I got here. You never want to say, Quit your bitching. Well, I do want to say that some. I mean, sometimes I think that Americans in this time are a little too prone to see the glass as half empty instead of half full. Our optimism, our unfailing faith in our ability to make the future better has been one of the great secrets to our successes over the last 200 years. And so I do feel that. I regret that at this moment in our history there is a lot of accumulated cynicism and frustration and that it is, in some ways, more difficult for the ENTITY to communicate directly to the American people than it has been in the past, because of all the indirect filters between me and the American people. The Presidency is more isolated than I wish it were, partly because of the security concerns that exist in this day and age. But having said all that, it is a joy and an honor to go to work here every day. And I feel good about the fact that the economy is coming back. I feel good about the fact that we are facing up to problems that have been ignored for years and years here. I feel good about the fact that we are able to do things like this family leave law and to give tax breaks to working families with children to keep them out of poverty, because I do not think anybody that works full-time with a kid in the house should be there. These are things I take pride in, not for me but for our country.


You have acknowledged that as ENTITY you have got to take the heat for this economy, and people are blaming you for not doing something about it. Besides speeding up the spending of $1.9 billion in Federal money for programs, what specifically are you going to suggest can be done for the economy, that the ENTITY can do without concurrence by the Congress? Well, $9.7 billion is the figure and I think that will help certainly in some areas. I will be signing a transportation bill tomorrow that is going to free up a bunch of money for construction projects. And then we may have one or two other things that are of significant size before the State of the Union. But a lot of what can be done in Washington relies on congressional action. And so, what I am going to be doing is taking a package -- some new elements, some sound old elements that we have not gotten Congress to pass, and say to the American people, Look, I need your help now. I want to lay aside partisan politics and pass this job-creating package to help the economy . We hear about all those old elements all the time; they do not seem to be working. What are some of the new elements you are going to propose? I would not tell you about that because we are still formulating the package. But stay tuned for the State of the Union and, as I say, possibly before then. But they should not say old elements that have not worked. They should say old elements that have not been enacted. these things are good ideas that we simply have not gotten Congress to enact yet. We have got to help the economy and help the people that are hurting. I talked to four Chicagoans who wanted to pose questions to you, and I am going to tell you about them and tell you their questions. One is a man from the Chicago suburbs. A veteran of Desert Storm, served in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, laid off when he got back from the Persian Gulf. And he says, It was almost better when I was in the Persian Gulf. At least I knew where the next check was coming from. My wife and son would receive some money every month. I wonder what the next year's going to hold for me. ENTITY, is it going to be better for me? And I can say that because I really believe that we will come out of this sluggish economy, some places clearly are in real decline.

Interview With Linda Yu of WLS - TV in Chicago, Illinois


And so, to him I'd say, One, we are grateful for the service. Two, the country has not forgotten that service because of the urgency of the economy here. And three, yes, I think times will be better, and I can guarantee you they will be better if I am effective in getting through the Congress the proposals that I will pose to them at the State of the Union. We have had some. We have not been able to get them through the Congress. Three straight years I have proposed growth packages. I have got to get the Congress to see that we must help these people you are talking about. Another woman from Chicago who gave up a career for her children. She is a volunteer in the Chicago public schools for the last 10 years. She says, ENTITY, I am one of your Points of Light. I am wondering, though, how can we improve math and science in our schools when we do not even have the money in Chicago to buy toilet paper and soap for schools, for our children. Why do you feel money for our children is less important than bailing out the savings and loan industry? I do not think money for the children is less important. Federal spending for education is up. But I would remind her, tactfully because she does sound like she is an unselfish person who is out there trying to help as a volunteer and that is an enormous part of the success in education, I would remind her that the Federal Government spends 6 to 7 percent of the total money on education. Educational spending in the last 10 years is up from, oh, by a couple of hundred billion dollars from $115 billion, or something like this, to well over up around $300 billion. So, it is not always a function of money. Our America 2000 education program offers the best hope from the Federal level. It is not going to replace the State level or the level she is talking about, or what the communities can do for the toilet paper or for the classrooms, but it offers the best hope from the Federal level of getting our kids better educated. I am excited about it. I believe America 2000 can really fulfill the Federal Government's responsibility. We also have a woman, a mother, who raises her children in the housing projects of Chicago. One's been accused of gang murder. And she says, ENTITY, my family's really no different from your family.


I have the same struggles trying to raise my children that you faced raising yours, but my community is very unsafe. I go outside there are drug dealers on every corner. I look around, the drug dealers have a lot of resources, but I do not have any. What are you going to do about it? What I think she ought to do is support our anticrime legislation that is hung up in Congress. It is awful hard to ask a person who is struggling at that level. But if more Americans will get in and say we want a tough crime bill, one that supports the police officers more and tougher on the criminals, I believe that would help her. In addition, we have got a National Drug Strategy that is doing better in terms of the interdiction of narcotics. But I really believe the short-term answer is more support for the law enforcement officials. the local police there in Chicago, they do a first-class job, and they need more support through Federal law, and I think sometimes through State and local law enforcement. You were here in Chicago last week, and everybody wants to know when you went to Billy Goat's, did you really like the cheezboygers, cheezboygers ? And I got a bum rap. Somebody said I asked for french fries; I did not . That was the guy that owns the place sitting next to me saying, chips only, before I even got my mouth open. But, boy, I loved it. I had two cheezboygers. And the people, the people were nice that I sat with. And, you know, let me tell you something, ENTITY, when you do something like that, everybody says show business. A couple of those guys were sheet metal workers that had just gotten to work. One was an unemployed writer, a woman who told me of what it felt like to not have a job. Another had a job at a company called Hill and Knolton. Another was a guy struggling but doing, I think, reasonably well in the computer business. So, I talked to them. And although they had those mics, that you people love, looking over my shoulder, at least I learned something. And I could tell them, hey, we care and we want to help. And I think they know it. I think they know that is what I feel in my heart.


You ran for ENTITY promising to end the war in Iraq. And at the time, you said Iraq was sovereign, stable and self-reliant. And now you are redeploying troops, some troops, to Iraq. Are you worried about your legacy in some ways, that there might be an establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the middle of the Middle East? Well, first of all, I think we did exactly what we should have done, which is to turn over to Iraq a country that had the capacity, the ability to govern itself if all the parties involved Shia, Sunni and Kurd were prepared to make compromises with each other. And I think the American people understood that whatever the debate about originally going in, our troops made enormous sacrifices to give the Iraqi people that chance. Unfortunately, that trust between those parties has never fully cohered. And now we are seeing some of the consequences of that. it has been disavowed by al-Qaida as being too violent. How urgent of a threat to the American people is ISIS? I think it is fair to say that their extreme ideology poses a medium- and long-term threat. Right now the problem with ISIS is the fact that they are destabilizing a country that could spill over into some of our, you know, allies, like Jordan, and that they are engaged in wars in Syria where, in that vacuum that is been created, they could amass more arms, more resources. Would that vacuum exist had we backed the moderate rebel forces in Syria? I think this notion that somehow there was this ready-made moderate Syrian force that was able to defeat Assad is simply not true. The notion that they were in a position suddenly to overturn, you know, not only Assad, but also ruthless, highly trained jihadists if we just sent a few arms, is a fantasy. This is the first ever White House summit on working families. I know you said in your State of the Union, when women succeed, America succeeds. What is the single most important thing you think you can do to help working women? Well, the question is not just what I can do, but I think what we as a society need to do. And this is an issue that is near and dear to my heart. I was raised by a single mom. Probably the most important financial bedrock of our family was my grandmother. And both of them were strong, hard-working women, but they experienced the glass ceiling.

Interview with Norah O'Donnell of CBS This Morning


They dealt with child-care crises. I am now married to a pretty strong woman in Michelle Obama. And before we got to this place, she was dealing sometimes with me campaigning or being away and her having to deal with two small children while also working. And now I have got two daughters. So I want to make sure that they are able to balance family life and the workplace much better than or at least their choices will be better than some of the choices that existed before. So the idea of this working summit is to really lift up conversations that every family all across America has every day. The workplace will be more productive and people will do better if, in fact, they have got a little more flexibility than they currently have. I mean, you look at, even as your you know, your oldest daughter does an internship do you look and say, wow, much has not changed, and this is kind of a problem, and I do not want my daughter to have to go through this? It is important for us not to deny the progress that is been made. You know, women occupy positions of authority and are able to take advantage of career opportunities that, a generation ago, might have been blocked. What is also true is that, you know, all too often childrearing burdens fall on them. They have got to juggle more stuff. What is also true is that, across the board in the aggregate, women are making 77 cents for every dollar that a man's making. Discrimination's still taking place. And so part of what we want to do is to lift up the possibilities of changes in federal policy. But we do not want to restrict it to just federal laws. We also want to show that companies on their own initiative will discover that it is good business sense for them to take advantage of or to offer workers more flexibility on the job. Why is it, then I mean, the majority of the American people back paid family leave that you cannot get it through Congress? Well, you know, we are we are unique among developed countries in not offering it. We have got, unfortunately, a faction of one party that says no to everything.


ENTITY left for this Asia trip with a slew of unfinished business in his in box, most notably that decision on a new Afghanistan strategy. Well, a week later, it does not appear ENTITY is any closer to making any sort of announcement. I will announce my decision over the next several weeks. I am confident that, at the end of this process, I am going to be able to present to the American people, in very clear terms, what exactly is at stake, what we intend to do, how we are going to succeed, how much it is going to cost, how long it is going to take. And I think that is what is owed the American people, because, frankly, over the last several years, that is not what they have gotten. Reducing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan any time soon. Part of, I think, the task here is making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable so that we can make that handoff. So my goal is exactly what you described -- creating a situation in which our footprint is smaller and Afghan security forces can do the job of keeping their country together. They need help from us. And that is exactly what our strategy is going to be designed to do. This decision, will it be the decision that ultimately ends the war? This decision will put us on a path towards ending the war. Can you understand why it is offensive to some for this terrorist to get all the legal privileges of an American citizen? I do not think it will be offensive at all when he is convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him. Pressed on whether he was prejudging a verdict, the former constitutional-law professor expressed confidence in the government's case. What I said was that people will not be offended if that is the outcome. I am not prejudging it. I am not going to be in that courtroom. That is the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury. What I am absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and in our legal traditions and the prosecutors, tough prosecutors from New York, who specialize in terrorism. Asked about the growing list of missed White House deadlines, including health care and shutting down the Guantanamo prison, the said he was not concerned. Guantanamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed. The rest of these deadlines that you are asserting oftentimes are deadlines imposed by the media, not imposed by us.

Interview with Chuck Todd on NBC's Today


We will , of course, be including your phone calls. The phones will flash on the screen. It was a little tougher to change things than I thought it would be. There was in this city a culture that I knew existed that tended to sometimes major in the minor and minor in the major, as you know. But I still found that if we stayed after it we could make change. It was not tough to adjust to the job. I like the job. And I was very concerned about how it would affect my family. Hillary and I wanted to-we had a good life before, a good family life, good work life. And we were very concerned about Chelsea, who loved her school, her activities, her friends at home. But I am proud of the transition she is made. And over the holidays when we were sort of reminiscing, we were most proud, I think, that our daughter had adjusted to her new school, made worlds of good friends, and has her ballet and other things. Yes. She was real important to me. I loved her a lot. And the night she died she called me. We had a wonderful talk. And then I went home, and we put the funeral together. And then I went to Europe, and I came back, took a physical, and then went to California. So you have had no time to grieve. You remember when she called on your show? You were in Ocala. We were in Ocala, Florida, and you set me up. My mother called me from Vegas. Last trip she took, you know, which is what she should have done. I saw some people who were with her the night before she died. That had to be the worst; what was the best day of this year? And then we will discuss a whole bunch of things and take calls. Well, I think my best personal day was Christmas because we had our families here. It is always very important to me. Hillary loves it. Chelsea loves it. And we had Mother here and her husband, Dick, and my brother and Hillary's family. Probably the passage of the economic plan, because it made possible all the other things, the victory of NAFTA, the GATT agreement, the passage of family leave, national service, all the other things. If the economic plan had not happened, we could not have turned the economy around, and we could not have had all those other successes in Congress.

Interview With Larry King


Let us run down some things real current. You are just back from L.A. Are they going to have tents outside for those people? They are working on that. They are also working on whether we can get some more trailers in and other things. What was that like to go there? I mean, we were there for it-- But I must tell you, standing on those pieces of broken interstate highway and to realize that happened in a matter of seconds, that massive- tons and tons of concrete moved, and then, of course, seeing all the homes ruined and businesses cracked open, it was an amazing thing. Well, I think the first and most important role is to assure that the federal emergency management program is working, that we are getting the emergency help to people they need, the food, the shelter, and the money in some cases, people have lost everything; secondly, that we put in motion the rebuilding process to get housing to people and to deal with the longer term needs; and thirdly, that in the case of Los Angeles, that we start rebuilding those highways as quickly as possible. So we have got to do this in a way that does not upset the economy. There are some, as you know, among us in America who will say, Well, it is their problem. They chose to live in that area. Well, because California paid for Des Moines when we had that awful flood. Americans are normally at their best in times of grave natural disaster. And I must say, after all the people in California have been through- they had the riots, and then they had the fires, and they have had all the losses of jobs because of the defense cutbacks and the national recession-to have this put on them. And yet I met so many brave people. I met a women who said, You know, I lost my house, but I'd like to say I hope nobody will take advantage of the Federal Government. Do not apply for aid you do not deserve. Do not ask for something you do not need. Somebody else may need this later in the year. That is the kind of spirit you get. And I would hope that the people of America would want to help those folks who through no fault of their own were really dislocated.

Interview With Larry King


I also would tell you when there is a severe economic disruption, whether it was the Middle West because of the horrible floods in the Mississippi River Valley and the adjoining rivers or now southern California in the case of this earthquake, it hurts the whole rest of the American economy. So we have got to be family in emergencies. And I think that is what America wants to do. What do you make of the Bobby Inman story? You may know as much about that as anybody. All I can tell you is that I accept his statement. He made a decision. I do not think we should lose sight of the fact that he was a four-star admiral. He gave 30 years of service to his country. He was confirmed by the United States Senate four times. You think maybe he really did not want the job? Because? it is just too brutal, what you are put through. That is what he said. Are there days you think that? You like it too much? I like it. But the only thing I have ever cared about on that is my family. You know, when Hillary or Chelsea get hurt or when my mother was hurt by something that was said or done, that really bothered me, especially for Hillary and Chelsea. They really did not sign on for all that. But for me, I figure, if you look around the Western world and you look at the recent history of the United States, if you sign on for a political career in the latter half of the 20th century, you just have to expect a level of that that did not exist before. And so I always say, if you want to get into this business, you need to know who are, what you believe in, and where you stand with what you believe because you cannot let yourself be defined by what happens outside. The reports today are that it was offered to Sam Nunn and he declined. Well, I cannot discuss that, otherwise I would have to deal with all the other personalities I have considered, and so I do not want to discuss personalities. Would you say he would be on the list? I will say this-that he would be a great Secretary of Defense, but he is got an awfully influential position now. I am going to proceed in a deliberate but fairly quick way to name a Secretary of Defense, and then I will talk about the process. Why in this year did we have so many appointment problems? First of all, I think most of it was because the rules changed on the household help issue.

Interview With Larry King


And all of a sudden it was a big issue, and the press was pillorying people that had the problem. if you have had this problem but you pay your taxes and then now you will not be-so that was the first big problem. The second thing was that people's writings became an issue for jobs other than the Supreme Court. That is, Judge Bork's writings were an issue but that is because the Supreme Court got to read, interpret the Constitution, and it was a lifetime job. The Senators and others decided this year that they'd make that an issue for everybody for confirmation, which I think is a questionable standard, but it did. You are talking about Lani Guinier and-- And one or two others that became an issue even though we got a couple through. I talked to several Republicans and Democrats who have no particular axe to grind now who think maybe it is time to have a bipartisan look at this whole appointments process. You have two and three levels of investigation. In that area, are we going to get a Deputy Attorney General for Civil Rights? Well, I certainly expect one soon. The civil rights bar basically was heavily involved in the nomination of the last candidate who withdrew. And the Attorney General is working hard on it. And basically I have given her my proxy on the thing, Just work with them. Work with people who are committed to having a strong civil rights enforcement. Interestingly enough, last year just when the Attorney General herself was in office and we did not have a full-time director of the division, civil rights enforcement was way up at record levels in many areas. So we have got a good record, but I think it is important to have somebody in there who is good. So you are giving Janet Reno a proxy meeting-if she comes to you tomorrow and says it is Joe Jones -- This is the person I'd like to nominate, unless there is some reason that I should not , something I know that she does not know, then I will be strongly inclined to go with her judgment. Of course, in your popularity ratings, which, congratulations, keep going up- went up today-you scored the highest in the area of race relations. Does that surprise you? I think the American people know how much I care about it. It is been a part of me ever since I was a little child. It was a big part of my work as Governor.

Interview With Larry King


And I think the American people know that I am committed to both equality and excellence, that I want people without regard to their race to have a shot at the brass ring in America. And I think also the American people know that we cannot solve the other problems, the crime, the violence, the family breakdown, all these other things, unless we reach across the racial divides. We just cannot do it. We are not going to make it if we do not . About Ms. Reno-we keep reading-she goes up and down, and again these are pundits who say this. I told her when she was hot as a firecracker, you know, with the public and with the press when she got here, and I was joking with her once, I said, You know, Janet, you go up and you go down in this business, and if you stay out there long enough, you will take a few licks. And she is taken a few licks, but she has an enormous feel for simple justice, which is what I think people want in the Attorney General. She is got a steel backbone, and she understands what really works. She, like all the rest of us-none of us are perfect; we all make mistakes. But boy, she goes to work every day and really tries to do what is right for ordinary Americans. If it is up to me, she is. I think she is done a fine job. Rumors are part of this scheme. I think he is done a good job. And I think if you look at this last trip we took to Europe, and you look at the work that he has done, along with others in the national security and foreign policy team, the United States was very well received in Europe on this trip. They know that we are trying to unify Europe for the first time in history. Never in the whole history of Europe has it not been divided. The divisions of Europe caused these two awful World Wars in this century, caused the cold war. We have got a chance to unite it. We may not make it, but we have got a chance to unite it. And he has worked hard on that, that is right. And I think he is really done a good job with the Middle East peace. He is managed this process. He is been to the Middle East a lot. And he is got good strong support at the State Department. So I think he is done a good job.

Interview With Larry King


What do you make of Mr. Yeltsin's grip there-strong? On a scale of 10, where would you rate it? I think he is got a strong grip because he is got a 4-year term and a constitution which gives him more power, for example, than I have here, just pure legal power. I think that in the last election, a lot of people who are not friendly to some of his policies did very well, partly because the reformers did not campaign as one group and did not do a very good job in the mass media and all that sort of stuff, partly because the average Russian's having a tough time now. One of the things that I did when I was in Russia, and you know, through that town meeting-kind of like we do-and let people ask me questions, and I tried to establish some link between them and these processes of reform that are sweeping the world. Because times are tough for them now. And I think anytime times are tough-and keep in mind, they have just been a democracy a little while. We have been at this 200 years. And we kind of feel haywire from time to time, and we have been working at it for two centuries. And so they elected some pretty extremist people and some people that are calling them to a past that is romanticized. And I think he is going to have a challenging time. He believes in democracy. He is on the right side of history. Some more talks and questions from me, and then he will take your calls. We are back to this talk with the ENTITY on this one-year anniversary. That is because we are in a winter-terrible situation here in-you cannot -you have a lot of power, but you cannot do anything about ice storms. You cannot do anything about zero degrees. We have not been asked to do as much as we were for the earthquake or the flood for that matter. More people have died in the Northeast-- It is a 100-year cold in a lot of these places. We have, first of all, tried to cut down on the Federal Government's power usage. We shut it down yesterday, shut it down today, and we are going to open late tomorrow and try to keep our power usage down so that we can give the power to people in their homes.

Interview With Larry King


Secondly, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Cisneros anticipating this, gave out all of our homeless money early, so that all the State and local governments all around here have got as much money as we can possibly give them to take care of homelessness and to try-- Yes, just try-on the event that it happened, we just wanted to get everybody off the streets as much as we can. And we are going to be looking for whatever else we can do now. Nature humbles all of us. I was looking at that interstate cracked open and those houses ruined in Los Angeles yesterday, and I just remind you that we are not in full control-- A ENTITY brings hope to that, does not he? Yesterday I could see-thousands of people came out to see me yesterday, to see the ENTITY, not Bill Clinton, And I could see their energy, their hope. One is to rally them by doing my job, and the other is doing my job. James Lee Witt, who runs the emergency management of this country is doing a wonderful job, and we work at that hard. And we owe that to those people. More things current, Special Counsel Robert Fiske appointed today by Janet Reno, was that solely her appointment? I did not know anything about it. Do you know Mr. Fiske? Whatever they want to do, we will be glad to do it. He says he is going to probably take testimony from you and Hillary. Whatever he wants to do. The main thing I want to do is just have that turned over to him so we can go back to work. I just want to do my job. I do not want to be distracted by this anymore. I did not do anything wrong. Everybody who is talked about it has suggested, as a matter of fact, to the contrary, that I did not . But still, let them look into it. I just want to go back to work. Well, let us wait until it is all over, and then maybe I will have something to say then. The main thing is, it is important that I not be distracted from the job of being ENTITY. That is what I owe the American people. I have got to get up every day, no matter what else is going on, and try to give everything I have to moving this country forward to changing this country for the better. And this will take the onus, if you will, off of that.

Interview With Larry King