I M Here. And We Re Gonna Win.

I guess most of us cannot visualize a campaign without Jim Baker. I’m looking forward to him coming over to the White House. Contrary to what has been printed in NEWSWEEK and other publications, Jim Baker and I are good friends.

Obviously I would have liked to have seen things handled differently in the 1988 campaign. But that does not, nor did it ever, affect my friendship with Jim Baker. I will accept mistakes that I made. And I’m not going to repeat them in 1992; 1988 was my first national campaign and I just deferred to the so-called experts. I’ll never do that again. I’ll be the expert. Obviously there is one campaign to be run and it’s the president’s. I am the vice president and I will do what we call the second most important thing of that particular day.

Well, obviously I put that line in there to trigger a debate. I did not anticipate the reaction. And what happened is that the first 24 or 36 hours many in the media tried to ridicule it, tried to joke about it, tried to dismiss it. As a matter of fact, one network said that we blamed the L.A. riots on Murphy Brown. That’s just outrageous, ridiculous. And the American people saw right through it. They started calling in on radio talk shows. They started writing letters to the editor and all of a sudden instead of just being a one-day or two-day story, it became a story for a whole week. We even have Bill Clinton spending 15 minutes of his convention speech addressing family values.

Oh, sure. We just have different approaches, I think, to how we want to implement family values. I think Bill Clinton is far more dependent on the government for family values than the president. We are the ones that want to empower people-we want to cut taxes; we want to get the government off people’s backs. We don’t want the government to be heavy-handed or involved in the family. He’s much more in mind to use the government to help families.

Well, let me just tell you what role models should be. Role models, I think, are a mother and a father–a mother and father and a child. There are different family arrangements today. You have divorce. I have a sister that recently went through a divorce. A family arrangement can be more or other than just a mother, father and a child. [But] I do not believe that unwed mothers are a proper role model.

From what I’ve heard, she’s a very good singer.

I can tell you where we’re similar. Our families are similar. We played basketball in the House gymnasium when we were in the House. But the similarities really stop there other than age. You can name just about any issue you want to and we’re going to disagree.

As I have said, if I thought that I was a liability or would hurt the reelection prospects of the president I’d be gone. I’m here. I’ll be the nominee and we’re gonna win.