But when General Powell came to see me about the do not ask, do not tell policy, the commitments that were made were very different from the way that it worked out in practice later on. And so there was no question in my mind, given the way they laid out what their policy was going to be, that gay service people would be better off under the new policy than they were under the old one. It did not work out that way, but the commitments that I got and the descriptions that I gave when I announced it at the War College, there is no question that if that had been followed through, the gays in the military would have been better off than they were under the old policy. And the thing that I did not understand about the way things play out in public, because I really was inexperienced in the way Washington worked when I got there, is that sometimes you just need clarity. And even if you lose, it is better to lose with clarity than ambiguity. And what had not sunk in on, I think, even the press writing about this was that once the Senate voted 68-32, the jig was up. It was over, because everybody knew there were more than 300 votes in the House against the policy. So we had a veto-proof majority in both Houses in favor of legislating the present policy, unless I could find some way to go forward. So that is what I tried to do. So it was not the Andrea Mitchell question on November 11th? Because I had lots of options there. Integrate; come back within 3 years and tell me how you did it. You could have signed an Executive order. I could have done that. And like I said, in retrospect, we would have had greater clarity. And since there had been so many problems with implementing the policy, I am not sure that for the past 6 years it would have been better. Now I think Secretary Cohen has really taken hold of this thing, and there have been some changes in the last 6 months that I think really will make the future better than the previous policy was. But to go back to the original question, I have a strong sense that during that first year, year and a half, you were not satisfied with the way the White House was working. No, because I thought we were often first of all, we had to do some stuff that was tough, that was going to get us out of position.


Our foreign policy team, I think, was working very well, and except for it took us too long to build an international consensus in Bosnia. But we eventually did it and did the right thing there. We were doing well in the Middle East. We took a big, bold step away from the traditional American position to get involved in the Irish peace process. And on balance, I was pleased with that. And actually, a lot of people have forgotten this, but when I came back from Jordan, from the signing of the peace agreement in the Wadi Araba in Jordan in late '94, right before the election, we were still in reasonably good shape, because my numbers went back up and that helped the Democrats. But I still believe that the underlying problems were the reasons for the election results. But the political problems of gays in the military hurt. I think that we had a lot of I was more frustrated by operational things, like leaks on Supreme Court appointments that were not even accurate, and I thought that the White House was not operating politically in a way that I thought was effective. I thought, policywise, we were not out of position on anything except the retrospective on health care. And I have already said what I thought the political mistake was there, about how I should have handled it, given the fact If you had to do it over again, you would have done welfare reform in '94 and the crime bill? If I had to do it over again, I would have tried to do the welfare reform and the crime bill in '94, together, and started a bipartisan process on health care. I would have had Hillary up and meeting, issue the report with basic principles that whole 600page however long it was, the stuff we did, I would have given it all to the Congress and said, Either you write a bill, or we write a bill together. Let me give you another, I think a tough if you had to do it all over again. When I look back on this period, you were rolling at the end of '93. You did NAFTA. You gave the speech in Memphis. I mean, even I was writing positive stuff about you at that point. And then came the wave of stupid scandal stories, the Troopergate story, the Whitewater stuff. That December the Washington Post asked for all the documents.

Interview With Joe Klein of the New Yorker in New York City


And there was a meeting that you had, maybe the only time in recorded history that George and David Gergen agreed and said you should turn over all the data, everything. And you did not do it. Do you regret that? Do you think that that changed things? I do not believe, given the subsequent coverage of the Whitewater thing, it would have made any difference. What I regret is asking for the special counsel, because under the law that existed before and the law that existed after, under neither law could a special counsel be called.  Why did you do it? I was there the night you did it. You were in Ukraine, Kiev. I did it because I was exhausted, because I just buried my mother, and I had poor judgment. And I had people in the White House who could not stand the heat of the bad stories, and they suggested that I do it and that I'd have to do it. And I had Bernie Nussbaum and Bruce and a few other people screaming at me not to do it. I knew that Janet Reno would appoint a Republican, even though all other Presidents had been investigated by people who had basically supported them. Lawrence Walsh supported Reagan; Sirica no, what is his name? Jaworski supported Nixon. I knew Reno would not do that. I knew Reno would appoint a Republican, but I knew that there was nothing there. I knew she'd appoint an honest, professional prosecutor. So I just did it, but it was wrong, because the decision to appoint a special counsel is a decision to bankrupt anybody who is not rich. I mean, by definition, there is a penalty associated with it. But if Fiske had been allowed to do his job, this whole thing would have been over in '95 or '96. And of course, that is why he was replaced, because he was going to do his job. No, because I think I mean, I do not want to get into this. I should not talk about this much until I am out of office. But I believe that the desire, the almost hysterical desire to have something to investigate was so great that it would not have made any difference, because, look, what did this thing hang on? There was nothing in those private papers that we we gave it all to the Justice Department. There was nothing in there that did anything other than support what the report said, which was that we lost money on a real estate investment.


And if you noticed, when Starr got ahold of this, he immediately abandoned that and just went on to other stuff. And I do not believe I have no reason to believe, given the coverage of the events of Whitewater, that it would have made any difference. I think they would have found some way to say, Oh, there are questions here; let us have a special counsel. But do I wish I had done it? Last week you talked about the clanging tea kettle, and you know I have written this continuum I have wrote that this era is going to be remembered more for the severity for the ferocity of its prosecutions than for the severity of the crimes. What do you think it is about you? And what about the Steve Skowronek theory, the Yale professor who talked about Third Way Presidents like you, like Wilson, substantively like Nixon, people who take the best of the opposition's agenda, sand off the rough edges, implement it, and are therefore distrusted by their own party and hated by the opposition? Well, I think that that I read his book, and it is a very good book. But I think in this case that is not accurate, for the following reasons. Number one, if you go back to '93 and '94, the Democrats in Congress supported me more strongly than they had supported a higher percentage of Democrats voted for my programs than voted for Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter. Number two, the Republicans never owned crime and welfare. They owned them rhetorically, but they did not do much about it. And at least in the tradition that I came out of as a Governor, we thought we were supposed to act on crime and welfare. Nobody when you check into the morgue, they do not ask for your party registration. And I never knew that anybody had a vested interest in poor people being out of work. And so I just never accepted that, and I found that there were a lot of Democrats in the Congress that were eager to deal with those issues. And if you look at it, we had I do not know more than two-thirds of the Democrats in the House and more than 75 percent of the Democrats in the Senate voted for welfare reform. And we had a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans in the Senate voting for it and slightly higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voting for it in the House but not huge.


So I think that maybe transformational figures generally inspire that, because most times people like to deal with folks they can put in a box. Maybe it is just maybe it is something about me that made them mad. You know my favorite joke about the guy that is walking along the edge of Grand Canyon and falls off so this guy is hurtling down hundreds of feet to certain death. And he looks out, and he grabs this twig, and it breaks his fall. He heaves a sigh of relief. He looks up in the sky and says, God, why me? I have taken care of my family. I have paid my taxes. And this thunderous voice says, Son, there is just something about you I do not like.  The folks like you. They never cared about this stuff. But I believe the Republicans thought I told you, I think that they thought The press, I think I was not part of the Washington establishment, and I think that the press did not know what to make of me. I think this travel office deal, it was largely a press deal. I mean, I did not know that they thought they owned the travel office. And of course, all I ever heard was one guy in the press who happened to be the head of the White House Correspondents at the time said, I wish you'd have somebody look into this because the costs are going up and it is not working well. But I think that all I can tell you is that the same guy that told me the same Senator that told me that it was about making people think I'd done something wrong in Whitewater also said that the Republicans had learned a lot from my Presidency. And he said, Now we have a different view. We think that they are liberal and that they vote like you, but they think like us, and that is more important. And I said, What do you mean? And he said, Well, we just do not believe in Government very much, but we love power. And he says, You know, the press wants to be powerful, and we both get it the same way, by hurting you. But I am sure maybe there were times when I did not handle it all that well in the early going. But all I can tell you is, if you look back over it, the Whitewater thing was a total fraud. Now, I have got a friend named Brandy Ayres, who is the editor of a little newspaper in Addison, Alabama.


I have met him, yes. He wrote an editorial that said, This is what always happens when Republicans get in the majority. They did it when they got in the majority after World War II. They tried to convince us Harry Truman and Dean Acheson were Communists. And then the second time, they gave us McCarthy. And now, they gave us this. I think part of it is how you view power. But for whatever reason, there is something about me that they did not like very much. Like I said, I am sure that my not being familiar with Washington mores may have had something to do with the way I did not handle the press right. Yes, you know I mean, I have said this in print, so I can say it to your face. That is the other thing we know about you. But I think in the beginning, for the first 2 years, I thought I was pushing a lot of rocks up the hill. Thomas Patterson, who has written books about the Presidency and the media and all that, he said in '95 that I'd already kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the previous five Presidents, which I felt really good about. We had just lost the Congress. I needed something to feel good about. But I do believe in '95 I was and '93 and '94, I was just fixated on trying to get as much done as quickly as I could, and also on trying to learn the job, get the White House functioning, all that kind of stuff. And I think that I did not spend enough time probably at least working with the media, letting them ask me questions, at least trying to get the whole letting them get something in perspective. And I think maybe I was just the last gasp of 25 years of scandal mania. We may be swinging the other way on the pendulum now. I think, after '98, maybe we have learned. You might see that in a different way. Let us talk about '95 for a second. Oklahoma City? No, the press conference the night before Oklahoma City when you said the President is still relevant here. I thought, Oh, my God, that must be the rock bottom for him. I did not have the same reaction to it than maybe you know, we often do not perceive ourselves as others see us.


But that question, I learned something from that, which is, if someone asks you a question that you want to answer directly, but there is a word in it that is dynamite, you should answer it without using the word, because actually, what I was doing in April of '95 in my own mind was prefiguring the fight which occurred at the end of '95 and the end of '96. I knew that in the end, if a veto-proof minority of my party would stay with me, after the terrible licking they'd taken in '94, if they would stay with me, I believed in the end we'd have our chance to make our case to the American people. In other words, I believed it would turn out the way it did turn out at the end of '95 and the beginning of '96. So actually, to me, it was not the worst point of the Presidency. When they asked me that question, a light went on in my head. I actually felt good about it. But because I used the word, it came out people perceived it differently than I did. I did not feel that about it. But then, a week later, you said at Michigan State, you said, You cannot love your country and despise its Government. He is figured out how he is going to go up against these folks. Yes, that is what I believed. But I think it began a kind of reassessment, a kind of breaking of the ice. Someone told me that you said, you told them that you would not use the word bureaucrat again in a speech after that. It affected even me. I realized that I had played on the resentments people feel about Government. And I thought that when Government did something stupid or indefensible, they ought to be taken on. But I realized that even when you do that, you have to be careful what word you use. And I did say that. I said, How many times have I used the word bureaucrat, and there are people there. And I did not mean to say that I or even Newt Gingrich was responsible for Timothy McVeigh. I do not want to get that is what he did. Are the liberals responsible for Susan Smith, the one throwing her kid out the window? I did not want to get into that. But Oklahoma City had a profound impact on me, too.


I went down there, and I was sitting there with the relatives, and one of the people that was killed had been in my Inaugural, and I was talking to his kinfolk. And I said, you know I just made up my mind I would try never again to discuss the Government, even people's frustrations with it, in a way that could be directed against categories of people. It really had a big impact on me, and I think it did on the country. Would it be fair to say that by the time you gave that speech at Michigan State, you were ready for battle? Now, this is a really interesting part of your Presidency to me. You had at that point a brilliant strategy in place to screw them. It was, smoke them out. You could have done to them what they did to you in '94. And yet, you insisted, ultimately against, from what I can gather, your entire staff, including people like Bob Rubin you insisted on coming out with your own budget, your own balanced budget, that June. Why did you do that? In other words, I could have done to them what they did to me. And that was the argument, that we'd just say no to them like they just said no to us. But governing is important to me. And I thought that in the end we would all be judged by how we had performed and by whether we had performed. And this may sound naive, but I believed that in the end, we could change the politics of Washington. I got an idea. You got an idea. Let us fight, and maybe we can both get our 15 seconds on the evening news. I did not want to do that. I came here to do things. I wanted to be President to do things, to change the country, to be relevant. And I thought that the Democrats I did not think the Republicans would take us up on it initially, because Gingrich had basically made it clear that he wanted to basically be prime minister of the country and turn me into a ceremonial and foreign policy President. We'd have the French system, in effect. Not only that, he told me on the phone one night he was personally going to lead a Wesleyan revolution that year. So that is basically what he wanted to do. But I just felt that the Democrats could not sacrifice what I was trying to do was to build the Democrats as a party of fiscal responsibility.


And for us and I went out there saying, Look, our credo is opportunity, responsibility, community. I just did not see that I could stand there and say, What do you expect of me? They are in the majority. I believe that you have to do things if you can. And my own view of politics is that there is always plenty that the parties are honestly divided about at election time, no matter how much you get done. Furthermore, I really did believe that the Democrat Party, in the end, would be successful by developing what is now known as the Third Way, but which I really saw as basically an information age version of what we'd always been for. What was your fantasy for a second term? If you'd had everything you wanted the day after you were reelected, what would it have been? Well, the validation of the economic strategy has been a part of it. I would have finished the job in health care and enacted my entire education budget. And the rest of it is still sort of pending. I am still hoping that we will get more done in the Middle East. And then, on the foreign policy front, it is going to pretty much work out the way I'd hoped it would, I think. When I look back at your speeches, if there were a couple of paragraphs where you best describe your political philosophy, the Third Way, they were in the 1998 State of the Union Address, and nobody paid any attention. Because I was standing what I got credit for there was just getting up, standing up What was the opportunity cost of that scandal? What did it cost you? I do not know yet, because actually we did in '98 we won seats in the House of Representatives, the first time a President's party has done that since Well, I do not know, because I do not know whether the Congress, the Republicans would have been more willing to work with me or not. Maybe. What I wanted to do with Social Security I am disappointed there. We still may get some Medicare restructural reform out of this. And in any case, Medicare is going to be okay for 30 years, which is the longest it is been okay for in forever and ever. And I think ENTITY Yes, but that is a problem, for God sakes. I mean, the generational transfer issue, I think, is something that you are really concerned about. I am concerned about it. You cannot keep a fee-forservice


But, but, but both Medicare taxes and Social Security taxes, in fairness, since 1983 have been paying for everything else. So we have had a little of that in reverse. Everybody has forgotten that. We have been dumping all these Social Security and Medicare taxes into the general economy all this time. I personally believe, though, that I regret we did not get to do Social Security because I would have what happened was, I think maybe we could have gotten it if we had not had that whole impeachment thing. But there was more resistance in both parties to do anything than I had imagined there was. They will have to come to terms with this. And I think you have either got to raise taxes, cut benefits, or increase the rate of return. What I proposed in '98 on Social Security, I think, was a very good beginning, and I really thought we'd get something. You could have, with your abilities, you could have gotten some kind of deal if you'd been able to at that point. Well, I do not agree with what he wanted to do there, and he knows that. I mean, I thought I agree with some of what they proposed, but some of what they proposed I think would not be good for Medicare. On policy grounds, he and I have had long discussions about it. I think there are a couple of things in that report that I just simply did not agree with. In general, when you talk about an information age safety net, what would it be, and what would be the guiding principles? I do not think that you can have the kind of centralized, top-down sort of programs that Social Security and Medicare I think if you had yes, but there is a great article let me just say this. And I do not believe I think you have to have some sort of if you believe there should be a safety net, there has to be some sort of safety net. Now, there is all kinds of options to get it done, and I think there should be more you can have some more room for private initiative. But if you had a safety net that worked, you'd have something for the poor and the disabled, the people who through no fault of their own were in trouble. You would have genuinely worldclass education for everybody who needed it, which is everybody. You would have access to health care at an affordable rate and decent housing, and you'd have to have a lifetime learning system.


And then I think you'd have to have some more generous version of the new markets initiative I proposed, because there will always be unevenness in the growth of the market economy. That is part of its genius, because you have to have opportunity for new things to branch out. But in my view, this new markets thing has been underappreciated. I was out there a year ago watching Al From and Jesse Jackson cavort along beside you. And it may be one of the great opportunities for bipartisan achievement in this session. It may be one of the great opportunities because Hastert is completely committed to it. He is been as good as his word on everything. I have talked to them both a lot. We do have a good working relationship now, even though we have our differences. I think the Senate has been far too grudging on the judges, particularly since I appointed basically mainstream judges. But they want more ideologues, and they hope they can get them next year. But anyway, I think a part of the safety net ought to be viewed as a willingness of the Government to make continuing extraordinary efforts, including big tax incentives, to keep the people in places that are left behind in the emerging global economy keep giving them a chance to catch up. And I think this whole digital divide is a I prefer to think of it as a digital bridge. I think if you think about what this means, basically, this information economy can collapse distances in a way that telephones and railroads and electrical I mean, I think about it in terms of Arkansas. When they brought us REA and the Interstate Highway System and I put all these little airports up in remote towns and all that, it all helped to bring, like, small-scale manufacturing to places that had been left behind. And then I got to a place like the Shiprock Navajo Reservation, where they make really beautiful jewelry, for example, where the unemployment rate is 58 percent and only 30 percent of the people have telephones. And you realize that if they really were part of an information age economy, there are ways in which they could do I remember when I became President there were a lot of banks in New York shipping their data processing to Northern Ireland every day every day and then bringing it back. There are all kinds of opportunities that we never had before. And I think people ought to start thinking about that as a part of the safety net. You know, this raises an interesting point about you, personally.


Shalala said to me that she thought that just as you were obsessed and voracious about social policy when you were Governor in the eighties that is one of the things I first noticed about you, is that you knew everything. I mean, you knew about the schools up here in East Harlem, more than Cuomo did, in fact. But as you were to social policy in the eighties, you have been hungry in the same way for knowledge about science and technology in the nineties. And I talked to Harold Varmus about it, and other people have said the same thing.  Well, let us talk about that. The one thing in our mantra about our economic policy which we always repeat fiscal responsibility, expanded trade, and investing in people those three things really were the sort of three stools of our economic policy. But one thing I think that tends to understate is the role that technology, particularly information technology, has played in this remarkable growth and the productivity growth and the long economic expansion. And I think our major contribution to that, apart from getting interest rates down so capital can flow to that sector, was in the Telecommunications Act of '96. And there were our major contributions to that act I might say, Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for because he was our front guy on it were two. One is we insisted that the Telecom Act would be very much pro-competition, which required us to get into a very difficult political fight principally with the RBOC's, operating companies, many of whom I have had very good relationships with because they do great stuff. They have helped us on all of our digital divide stuff, a lot of the new market stuff. But I just thought that we had to bend over backwards to maximize the opportunity for people with ideas to start new companies and get in and compete. And we fought that through, and it delayed the passage of the Telecom Act, but eventually we got what we wanted. And as I remember, while there were more Democrats than Republicans for our position, there were actually people on both sides of both parties. But we very much wanted to have a procompetition bias. The other night, interestingly enough, I was at dinner in New York with a friend of mine who was in the telecom business and then got in the venture capital business with telecom. He had a dinner for me, and I had dinner with like 40 people, all of whom headed companies that did not exist in 1996.


I went out to UUP, which is an Internet connection company, which had 40 or 80 employees, something like that, in 1993, when I became President, and they have 8,000 now. And the second thing we did was to fight for the E-rate, which democratized the Internet and democratized the telecommunications revolution. We have got 95 percent of our schools have at least one Internet connection, and 90 percent of the poorest schools have an Internet connection. And then I also continued to push relentlessly these last 8 years for greater investment in science and technology. It was interesting; I have had an interesting relationship with the Congress since the Republicans won the majority, because they look around for things that they can spend more money on than me. They knew they would always be whatever defense number I proposed, they'd always be for more. And they liked to I am always for a balance between mass transit and highways, and they are always a little more on the highways side. And Harold Varmus did a brilliant job; when the Republicans won the Congress, he brought all these freshmen Congressmen out, showed them the NIH, showed them what they were doing, explained the genome project to them. And I think John Porter was the head of the subcommittee in the House that had this. He is smart, and he wanted to do the right thing. And so, anyway, I figured out after the first go-round that whatever I proposed, they'd propose more, which suited me fine because I basically do not think you can spend too much on those things. But the problem I had early on and the problem I still have is, notwithstanding how much money we have, the Republicans do not, in my view, spend enough money on non-NIH research. For example, they just took out all the money that I proposed for nanotechnology, this highly microscopic technology which could increase the power of computer generation by unfathomable amounts. Because as one night Hillary had we had all these millennial evenings at the White House. And then we had one the other day on outer space and the deep oceans; we did it in the afternoon. But we had one on the human genome project, and we had Eric Lander from Harvard, who is a biological scientist, and we had Vint Cerf, who was one of the developers of the Internet.


He actually sent the first E-mail ever sent, 18 years ago or 19 years ago now to his then profoundly deaf wife, who now can hear because she is got a microdigital chip that is been planted deep in her ear. She heard, at 50 she said she is sure she is the only person who is ever heard James Taylor sing Fire And Rain at the age of 50 for the first time. But the point they were making is that the biomedical advances that would flow out of the human genome project, which the Republican majority will support lavishly, depended upon the development of the computer technology, and that without the development of the computer technology, you could never parse something as small as the human genome and get into all these genes and understand all the permutations. For example, there was a fascinating article the other day about one of the implications of the human genome, saying that talking about these two women who had a form of cancer, and that basically, if you look at the historical studies of all women in this category with this kind of cancer, diagnosed at this point in their illness, that you would say they had a 45-percent chance of survival. But now they can do genetic testing showing that they actually have very different conditions, and that one of them had a 20-percent chance of survival, the other had an 80-percent chance of survival. Now, the reason they can do that is because not only of the biological advances but the nonbiological advances that make it possible to measure the biological differences. And I could give you lots of other examples. And again, I owe a lot of this to Al Gore. He convinced me in 1993 that climate change was real. And he wrote that book in '88, and they are still making fun of his book. And I remember as late as last year we had a House subcommittee that treated climate change like a conspiracy to destroy the economy of the United States. But now, you have got all the major oil companies admitting that it is real, that the climate really is warming at an unsustainable rate. And that is why we pushed the Kyoto Protocol and why I want to spend a lot more money, and also have tax incentives, for people to keep making advances in energy technologies and environmental conservation technologies.


So my frustration about where we are now is that I am really grateful that the Republican majority has embraced NIH, because it is been good and it is enabled me to present budgets under the old budget caps that I knew they would break, so I could get adequate funding for education, for example, and still know we are going to do a really good job on NIH. But I think we need a much broader commitment in the Congress to research in other areas of science and technology, going beyond the biological sciences. when it became clear to you I mean, I know this is prompting you to sound braggart, but so be it. This whole thing is taking off, and my larger sense of us moving from the industrial age to the information age is really true, and all of a sudden we have these surpluses. Was there a moment when the bolt of lightning hit and knocked you off the donkey on the way to the West Wing?  I spent a lot of '98 trying to dodge bolts of lightning. Well, that is the irony of this, I think, is that that was probably going to be the moment that the press was going to realize that there had been a coherence to this whole project all along, and we managed to work our way out of that. In '98, I spent a lot of '98 And I spent a lot of '98 sort of wrestling with three overwhelming feelings. One is, obviously there was a lot of pain involved because I had made a terrible personal mistake, which I did try to correct, which then a year later got outed on or almost a year later and had to live with. And it caused an enormous amount of pain to my family and my administration and to the country at large, and I felt awful about it. And I had to deal with the aftermath of it. And then, I had to deal with what the Republicans were trying to do with it. But I had a totally different take on it than most people. I really believed then and I believe now I was defending the Constitution. And while I was responsible for what I did, I was not responsible for what they did with what I did that was their decision and that I had to defend the Constitution.


And so I felt that I still believe historically two of the great achievements of my administration were facing down the Government shutdown in '95 and '96, and then facing this back, and that those two things together essentially ended the most overt and extreme manifestations of the Gingrich revolution. And I still believe if we can get one or two things straight for the future, that a lot of the good stuff is still ahead. I am not going to let you off that so easily. Were there days, were there moments that you remember where you saw, hey, this is happening? I just was happy because I thought to be fair, I do not think any of us thought in '93 if you asked me in '93, What level of confidence do you have this economic plan is going to work, I would say very, very high. And if you asked me, What do you mean by 'working, ' when I started in '93, I would say we'd probably have between 16 million and 18 million new jobs. I never would have guessed 22.5 million and maybe more. I would have said I was fairly sure that we'd get rid of the deficit by the time I left office. I did not know in '93 that we'd be paying off nearly $400 billion of the national debt when I left office and we'd be looking at taking America out of debt, which is a goal I hope will be ratified by this election. And I hope the American people will embrace that, because I think that is quite important. So in '98 I began to imagine just how far we could go, you know, and to think about that. There is another aspect to this that we have not talked about that I think has really been central. In '93 would you have predicted that the state of race relations would have gotten to the point that it is gotten to now? I mean, I do not know whether you can sense I sensed it out on the trail this year. Bob Dole went to Bob Jones in '96 and did not pay any price at all, did he? This year you could not do it. And everywhere you go in this country, people of different races are having lunch together and holding hands. I confess, you know, I like Senator Dole very much, but I would have made him pay a price if I had known he went to Bob Jones University. You did not know about the dating policy?


No, I did not know he went to Bob Jones University. I did not know about the dating policy, but I knew about Bob Jones because I am a white southerner. And I think the Bob Jones thing I think Governor Bush going there mattered more maybe to white southerners my age who supported civil rights than maybe to even other Americans, because it has a whole because of the history there. It was a big deal to me. But I do believe we have come a long way. And I think I hope I made some contribution to that, because I think it is really important. I have tried to get Americans to understand that how we handle this I still believe how we handle this is, in a way, the most important thing, because we are a great country and we are full of smart people and we nearly always get it right, unless we get in our own way. And it is just like me nations are like people, individuals, in the sense that very often all their greatest wounds are self-inflicted. And this whole state of racism, it is a self-inflicted wound. This was where I was wrong on affirmative action, I think, in the end, when I kicked you around on that. I never wanted it to last forever, and I think that we had to clean up some of the contracting policies and some of the other things. Well, we made some changes, and I hear a lot of complaining about it from people that have been affected by them. But I still believe that and to be fair to my critics or skeptics, it is a lot easier to sell an affirmative action in good economic times than in tough economic times. I believe what launched the assault on affirmative action in the beginning was that, number one, it did seem to be that nobody was ever reexamining it, its premises. But secondly, the big start was in California because California was suffering so much from a recession in the late eighties and early nineties. And people felt that they were being disenfranchised, and they felt that the circumstances were squeezing in on them anyway, and they did not want any other burdens that they lost just because they happened to be in the majority. So I think maybe the acid test of whether I was right or not will not come until there is another period of economic difficulty.  But I think there is enough evidence in on that.


I think if there are adversities coming out of welfare reform in the next economic downturn, or as far as there are now, it may be because it is largely because of decisions States have made about how to spend or not to spend properly the big extra money they got because we grandfathered them in at the amount of money they were getting when welfare rolls were at their height in February of '94. I think that is when we did that. I think we grandfathered them anyway, whatever month it was, we grandfathered their cash flow in when welfare rolls were high, on the theory that we wanted them to spend this money on education, on transportation, on housing assistance, on training people to not just take jobs but to be able to keep jobs, or find new jobs if they lost them. And there are some stories coming in which are troubling, but which have more to do with decisions that were made at the State level. The thing that some of the people who criticized me on the left for welfare reform never understood, I do not think they said, Oh, gosh, he is ending this national benefit. But that was a joke, because for more than 20 years, by 1996, States had been able to set their own rate. So you had the family support monthly support for a family of three on welfare varied anywhere from a low of $187 a month to a high of $665 a month on the day I signed the welfare reform bill. Nobody was going to go below $187 a month. And if there was a political consensus for a higher level, they were not going to go out and gut people. And the idea of spending this money to empower people to go into the workplace and then require people who could do so to try to get their personal act together and access the benefits and go in there, and then letting them keep their medical coverage for a while, is very, very important. The only thing I did not like about the welfare reform bill was not that; it was the immigrant thing. But the two I vetoed everybody acted at the time the only thing that really disturbed me, and I realized I had not succeeded in getting people into the intricacies of welfare policy, was that I had people, both liberals and conservatives, who said, Well, he vetoed two of them, but he signed the third one because it is getting close to the election, and he wants credit for that.


The thing we were fighting about was whether or not, if you required people on welfare to go to work and they refused to meet the requirement that is, they acted in a way that violated the responsibility portions of the law how do you minimize the impact on their kids? And what I was unwilling to do, because there was a uniform national benefit there, was to scrap the food stamps or the Medicaid coverage for the children, where we did have a uniform national standard and nowhere near the variations that already existed in the monthly cash payment. So I thought that finally when they agreed to put those back in, I believed, given the way the budget fights were unfolding and by then I was in my second one, in '96 that within a couple of years I would be able to restore most of the immigrant cuts. So I still think that some of them are not right and that we have not restored, but I think, on balance, the welfare reform bill was a big net advance in American social policy and the right thing to do. That is an interesting phrase, given the way the budget fights were unfolding. There seems to have been a pattern since '95, and I think that that may be part of the reason why people might not see the whole of what has gone on here Huge. And I have got to give a lot of credit to Panetta and Bowles, who was brilliant at it, and John Podesta and Ricchetti and all these people that worked the Congress, because they and the congressional leadership in our party. Keep in mind, any time that our support among the Democratic minority drops below a third plus one, I have no power in the budget process. So I think that but we have gotten enormous amounts done for poor people, for the cause of education we have gone from a million dollars a year in 3 years to $445 million a year, something like that, in programs for after-school. And my budget this year, if we get that, we will really be able to put an afterschool program in every failing school in America if we get what I asked for this year. I think that is one of the reasons that a lot of what we did in education has not been fully appreciated. Ten million people taking advantage of HOPE scholarships and lifelong learning credits this year, according to Gene. I mean, are you frustrated that this kind of stuff is not more known? But the main thing for me now is that it is happening.


And the other thing that I think is really important I'd just like to mention, that I think almost no one knows, that I think is, over the long run, particularly if we can get it is interesting, the Republicans say they are for accountability, but they will not adopt my Education Accountability Act, which would require more explicit standards, more explicit turn around failing schools or shut them down, and voluntary national tests, which they are against, but we are working on it still. But just what we did in '94 in '94, in a little-known provision of our reenactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we required States to identify getting Title I money to identify failing schools and to develop strategies to turn them around. States like Kentucky that have taken it seriously have had a breathtaking result. I was down at that little school in Kentucky, in eastern Kentucky, the other day. And it was a failing school, one of the worst in Kentucky, over half the kids on school lunches now ranked in the top 20 elementary schools in Kentucky, in 3 years. What did they do? Well, let me tell you the results they got. In 3 years, here is what happened. They went from 12 percent of the kids reading at or above grade level to 57 percent. They went from 5 percent of the kids doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent. They went from zero percent of the kids doing at or above grade level in science to 63 percent in 3 years. And they ranked 18th in the performance of elementary schools in Kentucky. I was in a school the other day in Spanish Harlem that in 2 years went from 80 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or below grade level to 74 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or above grade level below grade level, 80 percent below, to 74 percent at or above grade level in 2 years. And I know what they did there because I spent a lot of time there. They got a new principal, and they basically they went to a school uniform policy, one of my little ideas that was falsely maligned, had a huge impact. And they basically went to they established goals and results, and you either met them, or you did not . So one of the things I mean, I think one of the most important accomplishments of the administration was basically opening the doors of college to everybody with the HOPE scholarships and the direct loans.


And if we could just get this tuition tax deductibility, then we have not made it possible for every person making $40,000 to send all their kids to Yale, but we made it possible for everybody to send all their kids somewhere. Not refundable, but it is deductible at the 28-percent level for people that are in the 15-percent income tax bracket. So it is a kind of semideduction. Yes, well, in our proposal you get to deduct up to $10,000 at the 28-percent level even if you are in the 15-percent income tax bracket. So it is not refundable, but for the people that need refundability, they have access to the Pell grants and to loans they can pay back now as a percentage of their income under the direct loan program. Let me ask you one last well, I am not going to guarantee this is one last. I might want to ask you if I have a few more over time, is there some way I can get in touch with you? You have interviewed 50 people. You have taken this seriously, so I want to try to Well, it is the last 8 years of my life, too, you know. And I have not even asked you about foreign policy, for God sakes. We will do two things. Let me ask you about foreign policy. It seems to me that if you look at what you did, there are two big things you did in foreign policy. One was raise economic issues to the same level as strategic issues, which was crucial, and the other was to demonstrate over time that America was going to be involved and use force when necessary in the rest of the world. The second one is, obviously, more messy and dicey than the first. The third thing you did was essentially not do anything wrong and do really right things when it came to the big things like Middle East, Russia, China. The messy part of it is the dustups in places like Bosnia, Kosovo. People have told me that you really feel awful that you did not do more in Rwanda. Let me back up and say, I had a when I came here, came to the White House, I sat down, basically, and made my own list of what I wanted to accomplish in foreign policy. I wanted to maximize the chance that Russia would take the right course. I wanted to maximize the chance that China would take the right course.


I wanted to do what I could to minimize these ethnic slaughters, which basically the end of the cold war ripped the lid off. It is not that they did not occur before, but now they became the main problem with the world. I wanted to try to create a unified Europe, which included an expanded NATO, supporting European unification, and dealing with all the countries around. I wanted to try to get Turkey into Europe as a bulwark against fundamentalist terrorism. That required some progress between Greece and Turkey, and we made some, not enough to suit me. I wanted to try to minimize the turbulence the possibility of war and nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which is something that was not right for my involvement until rather late in my term. But one of the things that and I wanted to try to and I will leave this until last I wanted to try to broaden the notion in America of what foreign policy and national security was, to include health issues, to include like we made ENTITY a national security threat to include climate change, to include the globalized society, all these issues we started talking about. So the one thing I would say to you is that I think this has all occurred kind of under the radar screen I will come back to Rwanda but one of the things I think should be mentioned is, we have spent an enormous amount of money and time and effort focusing America on how to minimize the threats of biological warfare, of chemical warfare. What are we going to do? Will the miniaturization of the information revolution lead to small-scale chemical, biological, even God forbid nuclear weapons? How are we going to deal with that? So we have done a lot of work on that. And to come back to Rwanda, one of the things I have tried to do with Africa is to and Sierra Leone is giving us a good test case here is to increase the capacity of the African nations to deal with their own problems, to support the regional operations like ECOWAS or OAU. And I developed something called the African Crisis Response Initiative, where we would go in and train African militaries. When I was in Senegal, for example, I went out to the community to the training site there, on our trip to Africa, and saw the American soldiers training with the Senegalese to dramatically increase their capacity. What happened basically with Rwanda is, we were obsessed with Bosnia and all the other stuff, and it was over in 90 days.


I mean, they basically killed hundreds of thousands of people in 90 days. And I just do not think we were any of us focused on it and whether we could have done something. But I made up my mind that we would certainly try to increase the capacity of Africans to deal with it and we would move in as quickly as we could. And like I said, what happens in Sierra Leone is going to be a little test of that.  You had it in principle. I think I had a very because I'd been interested in it since I was a student in college, and I'd always been fascinated by world affairs. So the fact that I had not been a Senator or served in a previous administration I do not think was a particular disadvantage. I think all the economic stuff I think I had right and the fact that there was a lot more in economics involved, and it was about democracy; it was about minimizing war; it was about lifting people's sights so they had something better to do than killing their neighbors, be they were of a different religion or ethnic group I think we had that right. I think we basically had the nuclear issues right, and the big power issues right with Russia, with China, what we tried to do in the Korean Peninsula. Where I felt I think where I felt some frustration is maybe where even a President with a lot of experience would have felt frustration, a lot of experience in this, which is building the post-cold-war alliances, which proved to be very frustrating. I mean, we had a lot of frustrations and we got panned a lot, and maybe we deserved some of it, and maybe we did not in '93 and '94, trying to put together some kind of coalition of our European allies to move in Bosnia. In Kosovo, having had the Bosnia experience, even though there were differences in the alliance, I have nothing but compliments for my allies. They were basically we had our arguments. Nobody has got a monopoly on truth. But basically, we got together; we moved quickly; we did the right things. And I think that the idea of how we might even go about mechanically, operationally, dealing with something like Rwanda just was not there. The French and others that had been more active in that part of Africa, I think they may have had a better sense of it, although they went in late. But you were acting with more confidence, too.


But it was I think that some of that, when you have got to have some support from other countries and you can have an uncertain result but you think you have to try, it just takes a while until you get your sea legs and you get everything worked out, particularly when there are not sort of institutional structures and policies and rules of the road there. If you take another sort of sad moment of the administration, when we lost our soldiers in Somalia Almost at the same time as the ship turned around in the harbor in Port-au-Prince. When we lost our soldiers in Somalia, it was a very sad thing. But that happened, I think and I hope the Congress will never decline to put people in peacekeeping missions because of it, because basically our guys did a terrific job there. But there was an operational, I think, decision made there, which, if I had to do it again, I might do what we did then, but I would do it in a different way. I remember General Powell coming to me and saying, Aideed has killed all these Pakistanis, and they are our allies. Somebody needs to try to arrest him, and we are the only people with the capacity to do it. And he said, We have got a 50-percent chance of getting him, and a 25-percent chance of getting him alive. And so, he said, I think you ought to do it. But today, with that number of people there and then he retired. I am not blaming him; I am just saying that he was gone. So what happened was, we had this huge battle in broad daylight where hundreds and hundreds of Somalis were killed, and we lost 18 soldiers, in what was a U.N. action that basically, if I were going to do it again, I would treat it just like if we were going to do that, I'd say, Okay, I need to know what is involved here, and let us do this the way we planned out the military action we took against Saddam Hussein, for example, or the military action I took to try to get Usama bin Ladin's training camps, or anything else. It does not mean America should not be involved in peacekeeping, but it means if you go beyond the normal parameters that you decide on the front end, then the United States has to operate in a very different way. I think it is pretty hard, but I think you anyway, I will always regret that.


I do not know if I could have saved those lives or not, because I think what we were trying to do was the right thing to do, and the people who were there on the ground did the best they could. But I would have handled it in a different way if I had more experience, I think. The only other thing I was going to say about this is that we talked about earlier how I hope in the future that the Congress will give more support to science and technology, beyond NIH. I hope in the future the Congress will give more support to our national security budget beyond the defense budget. As well-off as we are, one real big problem, we should be spending much more than we are spending, in my judgment, to fight global disease, to promote global development, to facilitate global peacemaking and peacekeeping. I think that we need to succeed in getting the bipartisan majority in Congress with a much broader view, because people look at us, and they know how much money we have got, and they know what our surplus is. And all these other countries are struggling, and we should not be so begrudging I fight with the Congress all the time in our contributions to peacekeeping and to creating the conditions in which democracy and peace will flourish. I am encouraged by how Congress voted in this Colombia package because it is a balanced package, and it has a lot of nonmilitary, nonpolice stuff in it. And I am hopeful that we will have a more I saw Ben Gilman had a very good article somebody else he and a Democrat, I cannot remember who it was, wrote an article in the L.A. Times yesterday talking about the importance of the United States taking the lead in the international fight against global disease. That is one thing that I hope, after I am gone, I hope that the next President will be more successful at than I was. Let me ask you this is it after you are gone, you are going to be the youngest ex-President since Teddy Roosevelt. If there was one thing that Teddy Roosevelt did absolutely awful, it was be an ex-President. I mean, he was really terrible at it because he was so engaged, so involved, and he could not quit kibitzing. Well, he felt, to be fair to him, that the Republicans had abandoned his philosophy. He felt Taft had kind of let him down. You also have a restraining amendment in the Constitution that he did not . But do you worry about that?


Well, I do, because but not in the way you think. I do not think that the next President, whoever it is, will have problems with me acting like I wish I were still President. And I do not want to complicate that. So the challenge I have is to figure out how to have a meaningful life, how to use all this phenomenal experience I have got and what I know and the ideas I have in a way that helps my country and helps the things I believe in around the world and does not get in the way of the next President. And that is what I have to do. I have got to figure out how to do it. I have thought about it, but I am not ready to talk about it yet. You have talked about everything else today. Yes, but the one thing that I the reason I wanted to spend so much time with this interview if you want to talk to me anymore, just call, and we will talk more on the phone is that you always knew and even when you got mad at me, it was because you thought I'd stopped it that I would take this job seriously. I mean, the basic thing that I can tell you about this is, I will leave Washington, believe it or not, after all I have been through, more idealistic than I showed up here as, because I believe that if you have a serious Presidency, if you have ideas and you are willing to work and you are not so pig-headed that you think you have got the total truth and you work with other people and you just keep working at it and you are willing to win in inches as well as feet, that a phenomenal amount of positive things can happen. And you always thought that I was trying to have a serious Presidency. I got pretty pissed off at times. But at least but when you were mad, it was because you thought I was abandoning something I said I would do, that I was trying to do. I never had any my frustration was with the people in your line of work that I thought did not take all this seriously, that thought it did not matter one way or the other, that thought it was some game, or who was up or who was down, or where was the power equation, or something. There are consequences to the ideas people have. One of the worries I have about this election is all these people writing as if there is no differences and there are no consequences.


The American people should make a judgment knowing that there are differences and there are consequences and it matters what you do. The thing that I think the last several years has shown is that a lot of these problems yield to effort. And if you are willing to just put in a few years of effort, you can push a lot of rocks up a lot of hills. People should feel really good about that. One of the things that I hope when I leave office that people will say is, I hope that there will be a greater sense of self-confidence about what America can achieve. But it requires you everybody has got to play politics, and I understand all that. I do not want to get sanctimonious about that just because I am not running for office for the first time in 26 years. That is part of the political system. And everybody will take their shots and do this. But in the end, the Presidency should be informed by a set not just of core principles and core values but ideas that there ought to be an agenda here. And you should not be deterred by people saying it is not big enough, or it is too big, or all that. There ought to be a broad-based view of where the world should go and what the role of the Presidency is in taking America where it should go. In that sense, I will leave office phenomenally optimistic. And everything I ever believed about the American people has been confirmed by my experience here. If they have enough time and enough information, no matter how it is thrown at them, in how many pieces and how slanted it is or whether it is inflammatory or whether it is designed to produce sedation, no matter what happens, they nearly always get it right. Democracy, if given a chance to work, really does. So, in that sense, I just I am grateful I have had the chance to serve. I have had the time of my life. I have loved it. Probably good we have got a 22d amendment. If we did not , I'd probably try to do it for 4 more years. Well, I will tell you something turning this off two things. One is, every last campaign I have covered since '92, I found myself judging against that one, in just big ways and little ways.


And the other thing I promised my son I'd tell you he is just finishing up his first tour as a foreign service officer in Turkmenistan, and he said his proudest possession is his commission document with your signature on it. Well, if you go back to that '92 campaign, it just shows you, though the only other thing I would say is, I think I was so advantaged by having been a Governor for 10 years when I started running, or however long I'd been serving, and having had the opportunity to develop these ideas over time and then to measure them against the experience I have had. No President with an ambitious agenda will fail to make errors. Things happen in other people's lives. Maybe something will happen to the next President. God knows they will not go through what I did, but maybe their kids will get sick. Things happen in people's lives, and mistakes get made. And sometimes you just make a wrong call. But if you have got if you are serious and you have got a good agenda and you have good people and you work at it in a steady way, you get results. It really is a job like other jobs. I did not even get a chance to ask that question. And maybe that is not good, but I do believe that we need to demystify the job. And if you love your country and you have got something you want to do and you have thought it through and you have put together a good team and you are willing to be relentless and to exhaust yourself in the effort, results will come. That is what I would like the American people to know. They should be very optimistic about this. They are in such great shape right now. It is not just everybody is getting along, but they appreciate the thing that you always said way back when, which is that diversity is a strength. Sandy was telling me about your first G-7 conference, which I do not expect you to talk about on the record, but he was telling me about how the Japanese were lecturing you about how to run an economy. And when you took office, most people believed that we were going to get taken to the cleaners by the Japanese and the Germans, because they were homogenous and we were mongrels. And now most people you know, most of those Archie Bunkers out in Queens have a niece or a nephew who is dating a Puerto Rican at this point.


Friday afternoon I sat down with ENTITY in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. This is a critical moment in the healthcare debate. And you have been able to assess the landscape, you have got a bill now that is working its way through the Senate, you have spoken to Congress. As you assess the situation, I wonder whether you approach this with a minimum threshold of what you will accept for reform, or at this point have you said, I have laid out my plan, take it all or nothing ? You know, I, I think that my focus is on some core principles. I have to have a plan that is good for middle-class families, who we know last year ended up seeing a 5.5 percent increase in their premiums even though inflation was actually negative on everything else, that have seen a doubling of their premiums over the last decade, that are less secure than ever in terms of the insurance they can actually count on, and more and more of them cannot get insurance because of pre-existing conditions or they change jobs or they lost jobs. So it is got to be good for them. Now, the principles that we have talked about--making sure that there is an insurance exchange that'll allow people to buy in and get health insurance and negotiate as a big pool to drive down costs, making sure that we have insurance reforms that make sure you can still get health insurance even if you have got a pre-existing condition, cap out of pocket expenses and so forth--those core things that make insurance a better deal for American consumers; making sure that it is deficit-neutral both now and in the future, making sure that it is driving down healthcare inflation so that we can actually deal with our long-term budget deficits, those are the core principles that are critical to me. And I actually think that we have agreed to about 80 percent of that, if you look at all the bills that are coming through all these committees. The key is now just to narrow those differences. And if I do not feel like it is a good deal for the American people, then I will not sign a bill. Those narrow differences can also, in some cases, be very big differences. And as you were ENTITY-elect last year, you said to the nation--in light of the huge challenges that the country faces, you said, We are going to have to make hard choices. ... And not all of these choices are going to be popular.

Interview with David Gregory on NBC News' Meet the Press


What are the hard choices that you are now asking the American people to make? And who are you going to say no to in order to get health care done? Well, I, I have already made some pretty substantial changes in terms of how I was approaching health care. You effectively said to the left it is not going to happen. What I, what I have said is the public option I think should be a part of this, but we should not think that somehow that is the silver bullet that solves health care. What I have said, for example, on what is called an individual mandate--during the campaign I said, Look, if health care is affordable, then I think people will buy it. So we do not have to say to folks, you know what, you have to buy health care. And when I talk to healthcare experts on both the left and the right, what they tell me is that even after you make health care affordable, there is still going to be some folks out there who, whether out of inertia or they just do not want to spend the money, would rather take their chances. Unfortunately, what that means is then you and I and every American out there who has health insurance and they are paying their premiums responsibly every month, they have got to pick up the costs for emergency room care when one of those people gets sick. So what we have said is as long as we are making this genuinely affordable to families, then you have got an obligation to get health care just like you have an obligation to get auto insurance in every state. Who are you saying no to? Well, that--I mean, that is an example of a, of a hard choice, because that is not necessarily wildly popular, but it is the right thing to do. You know, I, I have said that it is very important that we take into account the concerns of doctors and nurses who, by the way, support our efforts. The people who are most involved in the healthcare system know that it is got to be reformed. But I have said that we have got to take into account their concerns about medical malpractice. Now, that is not popular in my party, never has been. But I have talked to enough doctors to know that even though it is not the end-all, be-all of driving down healthcare costs, it is very important to providers to make sure that their costs are going down.


So I think there are going to be a whole series of Republican ideas, ideas from my opponents during the campaign that we have incorporated and adopted. And, and, you know, one of the things I have always said is if this had been easy, it would've been taken care of by Teddy Roosevelt. But you are not really taking on--I mean, you are not saying to the left they have got to accept malpractice reform or, or caps on, on jury awards. You do not even think that that contributes to the escalating costs of health care. What do you--what are you really doing to say to the left, Look, you may not like this, but you have got to get on board and we have got to do this ? Maybe you have not been paying attention to what both the left and the right have been saying about my speech to Congress. I laid down some pretty clear parameters. And what I said was we are going to take ideas from both sides. The bottom line is that the American people cannot afford to stay on the current path, we know that, and that both sides are going to have to give some. Everybody's going to have to give some in order to get something done. We would not have gotten this far if, you know, we had not been pretty insistent, including to folks in my own party, that we have got to get past some of these ideological arguments to actually make something happen. This healthcare debate, as you well know, can sometimes be about bigger things. is the view somehow that government is out of control. And in some cases, it is gotten very personal. Your election, to a lot of people, was supposed to mark America as somehow moving beyond race. And yet this week you had former president Jimmy Carter saying most--not just a little, but most of this Republican opposition against you is motivated by racism. Do you agree with that? Look, I said during the campaign, are there some people who still think through the prism of race when it comes to evaluating me and my candidacy? Sometimes they vote for me for that reason, sometimes they vote against me for that reason. I am sure that was true during the campaign, I am sure that is true now. But I think you actually put your finger on what this argument's really about, and it is an argument that is gone on for the history of this republic. And that is what is the right role of government?


How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another? I talked about this in the joint session speech. This is not a new argument, and it always invokes passions. And I--there--it was a passionate argument between Jefferson and Hamilton about this. You know, Andrew Jackson built a whole political party around this notion that somehow, you know, there, there is populist outrage against a federal government that was overintrusive. And so what, what I think is going on is, is that we have got a healthy debate taking place. The vast majority of people are conducting it in a very sensible way. I think that every president who is tried to make significant changes along these lines, whether it was FDR or Ronald Reagan, illicit very strong, passionate responses. But I do think that we all have an obligation to try to conduct this conversation in a civil way and to recognize that each of us are patriots, that each of us are Americans and that, by the way, the--my proposals, as much as you may not like them if you are a Republican or on the right, recognize that this is well within the mainstream of what Americans have been talking about for years in terms of making sure that everybody in this country gets decent health care and that people who have health care are protected. There are others in the Congressional Black Caucus, other thinkers who have said that they agree, that there is racism out there in that opposition to you. Are you, are you saying to the former president and others to speak this way is counterproductive? Well, look, ENTITY, here is what I am saying. I, I think that the media loves to have a conversation about race. I mean, this is, is catnip to, to the media because it is a running thread in American history that is very powerful and it invokes some very strong emotions. I am not saying that race never matters in, in any of these public debates that we have. What I am saying is this debate that is taking place is not about race, it is about people being worried about how our government should operate. Now, I think a lot of those folks on the other side are wrong. I think that they have entirely mischaracterized the nature of our efforts.


And I think it is important that we stay focused on solving problems as opposed to plucking out a sentence here or a comment there and then the entire debate, which should be about how do we make sure that middle-class families have secure health care, does not get consumed by other things. House Speaker Pelosi worried about the opposition, the tone of it perhaps leading to violence as it did in the '70s. Do you worry about that? Well, look, I think that we have an obligation in Washington as leaders to make sure that we are sending a strong message that we can disagree without being disagreeable, without, you know, questioning each other's motives. When we start caricaturing the other side, I think that is a problem. And unfortunately, we have got, as I said before, a 24-hour news cycle where what gets you on the news is controversy. What gets you on the news is the extreme statement. The easiest way to get 15 minutes on the news or your 15 minutes of fame is to be rude. And it starts with me, and I have tried to make sure that I have sent a clear signal and I have tried to maintain an approach that says, Look, we can have some serious disagreements, but at the end of the day I am assuming that you want the best for America just like I do. You get a lot of airtime too, though, and you--yours are not rude. Well, you know, the--I, I do occupy a pretty special seat at the moment. But, but I do think that--look, I mean, let us face it. If, if you look at the news cycle over the last, over the last week, you know, it, it has not been the sensible people who, you know, very deliberately talk about the important issues that we face as a country. That is not the folks who've getting a lot of coverage. Let me ask you about another important issue facing you and your administration, and that is Afghanistan. We have now been in Afghanistan for eight years. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan after 10 years. Are we committed to this war for an indefinite period of time, or do you think in your mind is there a deadline for withdrawal? I do not have a deadline for withdrawal, but I am certainly not somebody who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries. Keep in mind what happened when I came in.


We had been adrift, I think, when it came to our Afghanistan strategy. And what I said was that we are going to do a top to bottom review of what is taking place there. Not just a one-time review, but we are going to do a review before the election in Afghanistan and then we are going to do another review after the election. al-Qaeda. How do we dismantle them, disrupt them, destroy them? Now, getting our strategy right in Afghanistan and in Pakistan are both important elements of that. But that is our goal, and I want to stay focused on that. And, and so right now what is happened is, is that we have had an election in Afghanistan. It did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped, and that there are some serious issues in terms of how that--how the election was conducted in some parts of the country. But we have had that election. We now finally have the 21,000 troops in place that I had already ordered to go. Are you skeptical about more troops, about sending more troops? Well, can I just say this? I am--I have to exercise skepticism any time I send a single young man or woman in uniform into harm's way, because I am the one who is answerable to their parents if they do not come home. So I have to ask some very hard questions any time I send our troops in. The question that I am asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus is, whether it is troops who are already there or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America's national security interests? How does it make sure that al-Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States ' homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe ? That is the question that I am constantly asking, because that is the primary threat that we went there to deal with. And if, if supporting the Afghan national government and building capacity for their army and securing certain provinces advances that strategy, then we will move forward. But if it does not , then I am not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or in some way, you know, sending a message that America is here for, for the duration. I think it is important that we match strategy to resources.


ENTITY, you are being given worldwide acclaim for your foreign policy programs or foreign policy initiatives, but your critics are crying a lot. I mean, I am sure you have heard that crying recently that you, during the last 3 years, have not looked homeward and have not taken care of business at home. How do you respond to that? I think they are not telling the truth. I think that in the first place, I see the world as one great big market. And I think every time we export, we are doing something good. So, when I go like the other day to an EC meeting in The Hague and try to expand our agricultural sales, that are very important in Missouri; try to expand those around the world, I think that is in the American interest. Secondly, I think world peace is in the interest of your kids and mine and our grandchildren. And I am going to continue to work on that. Thirdly, I have a good domestic agenda program. But my problem is the liberal Democrats that control both Houses of the Congress want to try it some other way. The crime bill, the transportation bill, and these other growth measures that I have talked about. In foreign affairs, when we went to win a war I did not have to ask the leadership of the Democratic Congress whether it is okay. Hey, is it all right if I move this division there? Is it okay if we send Schwarzkopf here or there? I did not have to do that. It is different on domestic affairs. You are always fighting some tired, in my view, tired, old ideas up there. Speaking of tired, old ideas, do you detect a swing in voters' mood in the country? Well, in the first place, the Buddy Roemer was a terrible blow because it gave rise to a very tough choice in Louisiana. I could not be silent in the face of a man who is an ex-Nazi, who is a bigot, whose past is full of racism. So, I have spoken out on that. And the only worry I have got on that one is will that help Duke or hurt him, because Louisianians are proud. They do not like people coming in from outside telling them what to do. But when you have a man that denies the Holocaust or is bigoted against minorities, I have got to speak out. I owe the country that kind of moral leadership.

Interview With Julius Hunter of KMOV - TV in St. Louis, Missouri


On the Thornburgh matter, yes, I am concerned, but I also was delighted when Governor Florio of New Jersey said, This is a referendum on President Bush, the elections here. And we swept both Houses. Do you think you might have to take the unprecedented step of backing David Duke's opponent, the Democrat? Well, I have done that. Yes, I have said that, that if I were down there I'd vote for Edwards. But, again, the risk on that is that you are counterproductive. But I feel so strongly that we must speak up against racism and bigotry, that I was pleased to do that in the sense that it is the principled thing to do. But I am not sure of the election effect. You are in an area with extremely high unemployment, and there are a lot of people who are struggling to make ends meet right now. There are the homeless and the hungry in this country, those who are in despair. Might you be getting a picture painted for you by your chief economic advisers that is rosier than it actually is out there in the jungle, in the real world? I do not think that is the case, but I think there is a danger of when you say the recession is over that people who are out of work -- and it is 6.8 percent or something of that nature -- misunderstand that. We had a period of growth in the third quarter, and the definition of recession is two negative quarters in a row. Well, we had a positive quarter. And what we ought to do is pass some of the growth measures that I have got before this Congress to stimulate growth and move forward on things like home-ownership and tenant management and a whole new approach. But I am having difficulty with the leadership in the Congress, frankly. They are thinking old, tired thoughts. And the American people see this. I will take my share of the blame, but the American people are right when in survey after survey they blame Congress, as many as four times as much as the President. But this is not a question of blame; it is a question of trying to help somebody. And I will continue to reach out to Congress, but I cannot accept bad legislation that is going to hurt everybody in the country. And the plan that is been recently offered by business and labor leaders, you are opposed to that plan.


What would you say to those 34 million Americans who might seem to think that you are not interested in them getting health care? I'd say we are going to have a health care program. We have got some good programs under HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan. There is another one, maybe that is the one you are referring to today that came out, that Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were on. The price tag on some of these are enormous. And we have got to have a comprehensive program where we do something about the costs that have accelerated so much and try, at the same time, to provide health care for all. The program, as I see it, that was proposed today looks very much like the one that they proposed in Massachusetts. And they put it in, and then the voters rebelled because it cost everybody way too much money. And we simply have got to be sure that when we get one, and we are going to have a proposal, that it is not going to bust the back of everybody else or put people out of work. You are concerned; so am I, about jobs. And you do not want to say to every small business, You are going to be rendered uncompetitive because the Federal Government is going to impose mandates on you. I know you do not want to aid and abet the enemy, but is there any Democrat that you would be loathe to run against in the next election? If there was I probably would not tell you about him. But, no, look, I have always said I will have a tough race. But I do not go along with the common wisdom as to who is the toughest or not. The media frenzy back in the East I expect -- I hope it is kind of been avoided out here in this very sensible part of the country -- but they have picked some that they think are the toughest. But let the American people decide this. And let the Democrats sort it out in their own primaries, and then I will take on whatever they offer up. And I have said, though, and not being cute about it, that the only reason that I can foresee would be if I had some health problem. That came up last year, but I feel like a million bucks right now -- before taxes.


It is great to be with you. You are trying to pressure Senate Republicans to consider Judge Garland. But Senate Republicans, the GOP, is applying pressure of its own. And just this week, two Senate Republicans, Moran and Murkowski, reversed themselves, and said they no longer support even holding confirmation hearings. Well, I think that things will evolve as people get familiar with Judge Garland's record. As it becomes apparent that the overwhelming majority of the American people think that the President nominates somebody to the Supreme Court, and the Senate should now do its constitutional job and give him a hearing. And originally, the Republicans said they would not meet with him at all. Now, a number of them have already had meetings. And the questioning that they are having privately with Judge Garland is something that should be done publicly. Through a hearings process, so the American people can make their own assessment. But I recognize there is pressure on the other side. Our goal is just to make sure that the Senate does its job and treats him fairly. Now, you talk about the Senate doing its job. You are calling for an up-or-down vote on Judge Garland. But back in 2006, Senator Barack Obama joined a filibuster on Sam Alito, a Bush appointee, which would have prevented an up or down vote. I think there is no doubt that Democrats and Republicans have gotten into a fix inside the Senate, in which the confirmation process becomes too much of a tit for tat, or becomes politicized. I will point out though, Chris, that never has a Republican president's nominee not received a hearing, not received a vote. He may be an excellent judge, but I just disagree with him philosophically on a whole range of issues, so I am going to vote against him. So, you'd be OK if he got defeated, as long as they go through the process? I think that if they go through the process, they will not have any rationale to defeat him. So my point is, go through the process, go through the hearings. I think if you do that, the American people and the majority of senators will determine that, in fact, he is qualified to be on the Court. Some Republican senators say, Look, if a Democrat wins in November, well maybe we will consider Garland in a lame duck hearing. Have you made a commitment to Garland that you are going to stick by him through the end of your term?

Barack Obama Interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday


Or perhaps, let us say Hillary Clinton is the newly elected president, would you pull him and let her make the pick? As more senators meet with him, I think they will recognize the qualities of this individual. What I think we cannot have is a situation in which the Republican Senate simply says, Because it is a Democratic president, we are not going to do our job, have hearings, and have a vote. Because if that happens, Chris, then it is almost impossible to expect that the Democrats -- let us say a Republican president won -- that the Democrats would not say the exact same thing. They will say, Let us wait for four years, and we will take our chances on the next president. Are you saying you will stick with Merrick Garland through the end of your term? I want to ask you about an interview, and extensive interview you did with the Atlantic Magazine recently. It says that you think that the fear of terrorism among politicians, among the press, among the public, is exaggerated. And then the article goes on to say, quote, Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Do we make too big a deal of the terror threat? I do not think we make too big of a deal of the terror threat. My number one job is to protect the American people. My number one priority right now is defeating ISIL. My number one priority throughout my presidency has been going after terrorist networks that would attempt to do harm to -- My point is that, how we do it is important, that we have to make sure that we abide by our laws. We have to make sure that we abide by our values. And we have to make sure that what we do does not end up being counterproductive. Ted Cruz. that is not a productive approach to defeating terrorism. When I hear people suggesting that we should ban all Muslims from entering the country, that is not a good approach to defeating terrorism.


when you say more people die in bathtub accidents, and I understand you are not saying it is not important, but you are saying we cannot overreact to it, is bathtub manufacturers are not trying to kill us, and they are not trying to up the body count -- I think it is fair to say that some of the sharpest criticism of you, from both sides during your presidency, has been the way that you have responded -- personally, not necessarily in policy -- to terror attacks. After James Foley was beheaded, you went out and played golf. After Paris, you said it was a setback. Even as we grieve with our French friends, however, we cannot lose sight that there has been progress being made. After San Bernardino, you talked about gun control. Right now, people on the no fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. And some people wonder, I think the concern is, do you worry about terrorism and feel the threat of terrorism the way they do? And I would say this -- there is not a president who is taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven-and-a-half years. I am the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So, let us be very clear about how much I prioritize this. and we have been doing it effectively. Well, I think part of it is that, in the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are. And what I have tried to communicate is, You cannot change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you. And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we are going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile. And you have nothing to offer. That is the message of resilience that we do not panic, that we do not fear. We will hunt you down and we will get you. Last October, you said that Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server did not jeopardize national secrets.


I can tell that you this is not a situation in which America's national security was endangered. Since then, we have learned that over 2,000 of her e-mails contained classified material, 22 of the e-mails had top-secret information. Can you still say flatly that she did not jeopardize America's secrets? I have got to be careful because, as you know, there have been investigations, there are hearings, Congress is looking at this. And I have not been sorting through each and every aspect of this. Hillary Clinton was an outstanding Secretary of State. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. And what I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are -- there is classified, and then there is classified. There is stuff that is really top secret top secret, and there is stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source. And the question is, can you still say that? I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized America's national security. Now what I have also said is that -- and she has acknowledged -- that there is a carelessness, in terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes. But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective. This is somebody who has served her country for four years as secretary of state, and did an outstanding job. And no one has suggested that in some ways, as a consequence of how she is handled e-mails, that that detracted from her excellent ability to carry out her duties. ENTITY, when you say what you have just said, when Josh Earnest said, as he did -- your spokesman -- in January, the information from the Justice Department is she is not a target, some people I think are worried whether or not -- the decision whether or not, how to handle the case, will be made on political grounds, not legal grounds. Can you guarantee to the American people, can you direct the Justice Department to say, Hillary Clinton will be treated -- as the evidence goes, she will not be in any way protected. I can guarantee that. And I can guarantee that, not because I give Attorney General Lynch a directive, that is institutionally how we have always operated.


I do not talk to the Attorney General about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line, and always have maintained it, previous president. I guarantee it. I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department, because nobody is above the law. Even if she ends up as the Democratic nominee? How many times do I have to say it, Chris? Yes. Yes. from the decisions that affect their lives? Well, there is no doubt that I feel frustrated about it. My whole, you know, operating assumption, in terms of our democracy, is the more people are involved, the more they know, the more they are involved, the more responsive our government is. Yes, I think that, I think it comes out of a couple things, Chris. Number one, we are still shell-shocked from what happened in 2007, 2008. We have now had more than six years straight of job growth, and cut the unemployment rate down to 5 percent. But, people lost homes, lost jobs, lost life savings. And they still do not fully know how that happened, and was the system fixed in a way that they can have confidence in. So, have you fixed that in eight years? Well, actually we have done a better job than I think most people give us credit for. I do not mean fixed the system. I mean fixed the perception. Well, the perception is going to be changing over time, as people see results, as they get more confident. But, and this is the big but, nobody's going to be 100 percent satisfied -- in a democracy like ours -- with every outcome. And I think the danger, both among Republicans, and among Democrats, who increasingly just listen to each other. Or they just listen to people who already agree with them. Republicans, they have their own TV station. You can say FOX News. They have got their own publications, their own blogs. Increasingly what happens is, we do not hear each other. And so what happens then is, when Republicans promise to repeal Obamacare, and it does not get repealed, they are outraged. If Democrats get frustrated, they say, Well, why did not we have a public option in our healthcare system?


Well, it turns out that 85 percent of people get healthcare through their jobs. They are pretty satisfied with it. They do not want big change on them. It was not necessarily because there was some, you know, corruption, or venality, or that people were unresponsive to democracy. I want, occasionally, people to step back and take a look. America's got the best cards. We are the envy of the world. We have the most powerful military on earth, by a mile. Our economy right now, is stronger than any other advanced economy. We have the best workers, we have the best universities. We have the most advanced scientific community. We have an incredibly diverse and talented population. This can be our century, just like the 20th century was, as long as we do not tear each other apart, because our politics value sensationalism or conflict, over cooperation, and we do not have the ability to compromise. And if we get that part right, nobody can stop us. I enjoyed it. Later in the program, we take a walk with the president as he discusses the highs and lows of his eight years in office. Up next, we will bring in our Sunday group to discus what the president had to say. Plus, what would you like to ask the panel about whether the Clinton case will be handled fairly by the Justice Department? Just go to Facebook or Twitter and we may use your question on the air. Hillary Clinton was an outstanding secretary of state. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. President Obama in our exclusive interview doubling down on his defense of Hillary Clinton in the private e-mail scandal. A look outside the beltway at the University of Chicago Law School, where we sat down this week with President Obama. And we are back now with more of our exclusive conversation with the president. We talked with Mr. Obama in the library at the law school where he taught for 12 years. He reminisced about that and a presidency that is winding down. Since I am sure this is a sentimental journey for you, I'd like to do a lightning round -- The day that we passed health care reform. And we sat out on the Truman Balcony with all the staff that had worked so hard on it and I -- I knew what it would mean for the families that I'd met who did not have health care. The day we traveled up to Newtown after Sandy Hook.


Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya. What you are going to miss most when you leave office? Well, you miss -- what I will miss most is the breadth of interactions you have with the American people. When you are president, you meet people from every walk of life, every region and it gives you a unique appreciation for this unbelievable country of ours. What you are looking forward to most when you leave office? I -- I have to ask, with all due respect, when you look at yourself in the mirror, and you have got a little bit more gray hair than you had, and you look back over these last eight years, has it been a tough job? Has it aged you? You know, I do not think it has aged me spiritually or mentally. But I suspect that in some ways the job may keep you younger just because every day is a new challenge. I, you know, I -- I have no doubt that when I leave the office, after a day, a week, a month, maybe six months, you will start realizing that day to day burdens that you are carrying and you will probably be a little bit lighter. But, on the other hand, the degree to which every part of you is tested and engaged, that keeps you young. Barack Obama, president of the United States, senior lecturer at Chicago Law School, wrote 'Dreams From My Father' in this office. It is true that I -- I got an offer to come. I could write and teach a seminar and eventually I end up teaching here at the university. I will tell you that it was pretty Spartan then. The Oval -- the Oval has better light. It is got more room too. It is got a little more room. I do not even think I had a -- a plant. Partly because I do not have a green thumb and I -- I was sure -- Unlike Michelle with her garden, I was pretty sure that -- Given what Dreams From My Father, what was your dream back then? Because I was -- I was a -- I was past the deadline. So what would you tell -- if you could go back 12 years in time -- that law professor? What would you tell him that he did not know about how the world works? Well, first of all, that law professors back then would think I was crazy saying that somehow you might end up being president.