President Talks About Big Government, The Convention, Chelsea and Promises

In the private dining room off the Oval Office, underneath a portrait of a brooding Woodrow Wilson, President Bill Clinton sipped ginger ale and spoke with TIME Washington correspondents Eric Pooley and J.F.O. McAllister.

Q: After the failure of health care and the Contract with America, do people mistrust big promises about what government can do? Are we entering an era of post-promise politics?

A: If government is going to do something, people want it to be clear, discrete and understandable....Take health care. If you try to reform it all at once, you're vulnerable to charges that aren't true but are powerful, like I was trying to have the government take it over. Secondly, people just wonder whether the law of unintended consequences will catch you up.

With Kennedy-Kassebaum, we did a big portion of what we needed to do. Now I think we ought to take the next step, which is to provide coverage for families who are working but unemployed for [an] extended period of time. Then we'll take another step....I don't think we're in an era of post-promise politics, but in an era when people don't want promises to be highflown and unrealistic.

Q: Is this stance an accommodation to a sea change in public opinion, or have you changed the way you think government can best accomplish things?

A: I think we've changed, and we've also accommodated ourselves to the realities here....How I've changed is that I've learned that the system simply won't accommodate big changes, even when, in theory, you think they're warranted, but that with a lot of energy and a lot of persistence you can do a very large number of things, which amount to a major shift.

Q: Why aren't you out there every day campaigning and advertising for a Democratic Congress?

A: A Democratic Congress would make things better. I've worked very hard to raise money for a Democratic Congress, to get a platform we can all run on....But if you look even at President [Franklin] Roosevelt at the height of his powers, there are some things a president has to be careful about in the way he speaks to the American people. You don't want to talk to a voter as if they don't have enough sense to make up his or her own mind about other elections.

Q: In the last few weeks a Democratic president and a Republican Congress have produced a lot of bills you're proud of. Hasn't divided government produced the kind of results voters want ‹- some reform but not too much?

A: These bills passed because the Republican Congress saw from the polls that the public wanted action....I think we could have gotten Kennedy-Kassebaum sooner, and an even better welfare bill sooner, if this Congress had been less partisan. Divided government can be productive, but not if it's extremist.

Q: Some of your advisors say the 1994 election was the best thing that ever happened to you, because it gave you something clear to fight against.

A: When you are responsible for passing legislation, very often the compromises, the conflicts around the edges, receive more publicity than the substance; whereas, when there's a fight, people can see who's on which side.

I think the [1992 Congress] did a pretty good job, but the people were treated to the internal conflicts within the Democratic Party. Now they know there are internal conflicts within the Republican Party too....But I still think that what people like is what we've done for the last 10 days.

Q: Senator Dole gets a lot of applause when he says, the president sends Chelsea to private school but opposes vouchers to let you send your kids to a private school.

A: Until we moved to Washington, my daughter had always been in public schools, and most of those years they were majority-minority schools....In the end we all decided she should go to Sidwell Friends, not only because it's an extraordinary school, but because she would have a measure of privacy there that she would not have otherwise. On balance, I think the schools are better than they were four years ago....I've been a big proponent of total public school choice as well as charter schools.

It may be very effective politically to use my daughter as an example, but it is not fair because of her own unusual circumstances, and it doesn't deal with the fact that what they want to do [with their voucher program] is to take funds now going to the public schools and give them to the private schools, when the public schools are already underfunded, which will hurt more children than the relatively small number they propose to help....If they had a different sort of proposal, it might make a difference.

Q: You're very proud, and justly so, of Chelsea. What of yourself at 16 do you see in her?

A: (Chuckling) I think she's smarter than I am, and in much better physical condition than I was at 16; but I see more of her mother in her than me. She has her mother's great sense of character and concern. But she's a lot like me in that she's got a great sense of compassion and feeling for other people, all kinds of people. Even though she's not at all interested in politics herself, she cares a lot about public life and the impact of public decisions on people's lives.

Q: In 1992 you made a lot of specific promises: universal health care, eight million new jobs, a middle-class tax cut. What three specific promises do you want voters to remember about your next term when they go to the polls?

A: First, I want them to remember that we've gone a long way towards keeping the promises I made last time, and that, as a result, we're better off than we were.

I will attempt to lay out almost all my platform for the next four years in the convention speech. I'm going to talk about education in great detail. I'm going to talk about keeping the economy going, but bringing jobs to people in places who haven't had them. I want people to think: this man is going to create opportunity, to bring us together, and, specifically, that he's got an education strategy and economic strategy that will help me and my family access the 21st century.

AllPolitics home page