Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. I want to begin by thanking the Vice President for his leadership on this issue. When we formed our…”

“Thank you very much. I want to begin by thanking the Vice President for his leadership on this issue. When we formed our partnership back in 1992, and we talked about all the things we wanted to do, and we had a series of long, fascinating conversations in which he talked to me about science and technology and the environment, and I talked to him about education and economic development and reinventing Government. And I told him that when I was a Governor, every couple of years we'd eliminate an agency just to see if anybody noticed. [Laughter] And normally, they didn't. And they never did complain when they did notice. And I asked him if he would--then after we actually won and came here, I asked him if he would get involved with this and really try to make it work for the American people, because I was convinced that there was so much justifiable anxiety out there among our people about the way Government operates, that unless we could change that we'd never be able to maintain the faith of the taxpayers and the integrity of the Federal Government. I also asked him to do it because he was the only person I could trust to read all 150,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations. [Laughter] At this very moment, Tipper is being treated for insomnia at the Georgetown Hospital--[laughter]--but he's just about through.…”