At one level, I do. Part of it is growing pains, learning pains, while we were trying to move very quickly to push the agenda of change. But I think there’s also been a constancy to it. We’ve had this immensely successful year in the Congress. We have begun to change the country and change the way government works and to make it more responsive to the interests of ordinary Americans.
I think in the early going, at least, because I accepted some compromises along the way, people were saying, “Well, he’s really not fighting for what he believes in.” I think now that it’s begun to change.
I tried to do so many things at once that I didn’t take enough time to do one of the president’s most important jobs, and that is to consistently explain to the American people what we were doing and why.
In terms of what I talked about in the campaign, it’s really amazing how much we’ve reversed Reaganomics. We have opened the doors of college education to more people by lowering the cost of student loans and making them more available. We passed the National Service Program. I pledged to fight for NAFTA.
There’s no way that you can’t be affected by different political reality, changes in the budget numbers. Those things affected -what I was able to do. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether it was, on balance, an error.
No, because it’s almost never about bad news. What upsets me is when I think we’re not doing the best we can for the country.
When I lose my temper, it’s mostly because I think we all have such an obligation to make every day count. It’s not the big stuff, the big problems don’t bother me. That’s what I signed on for. And it’s certainly not the bad news. What bothers me is when I think somehow the system is keeping us from doing what we need to do for the American people.
If there are jobs for people to do. That’s a big if, though. We’re probably going to have some sort of publicly funded jobs program.
If someone becomes pregnant and decides to have a baby rather than have an abortion, that may be a moral decision. So I wouldn’t say that everybody who becomes pregnant out of wedlock who has a baby is immoral. But I believe that this country would be a lot better off if children were born to married couples. Remember the Dan Quayle speech? There were a lot of very good things in that speech. The Murphy Brown thing was a mistake. It was too cute because this woman is not symbolic of the real problem in society. Would we be a better-off society if babies were born to married couples? You bet we would.
I think there’s a stigma now–the problem is most of the people having children out of wedlock are people who are not part of the mainstream society. They don’t feel any hope, any aspirations. The Children’s Defense Fund released a report a couple of years ago chronicling young women who had one child out of wedlock and women who had a second one. The biggest difference was that the first group acquired a high level of confidence and education and learning skills and began to think about their future and therefore imposed different standards on themselves. So I think that as a society, we ought to say, “We’d like for our babies to be born into intact families.” As long as we make it clear that we are not advocating that young people who become pregnant choose abortion over childbirth. But we’re going to have to reestablish the conditions in which the family can flourish. And one of the reasons I’m for welfare reform is that I think that if we do it right, it’ll be pro-family.
I wouldn’t say nuclear disaster, because during the cold war, had there been any exchange of nuclear weapons it would almost certainly have been a total exchange and therefore utterly cataclysmic. I think it is fair to say that there is somewhat more disarray in the system, by which not only nuclear but other weapons of mass destruction are capable of being produced and distributed, than there was then. In other words, the bipolar world had a little more discipline, certainly on the nuclear side.
North Korea is a special case and a deeply troubling one. They are so isolated that I’m afraid their view of reality is very different from our view of reality. I have tried to follow a policy of holding out the promise of dialogue, not only with us but with the South Koreans and still be firm about where we had to go.
