Bill Clinton: “That is not at all what I have done. First of all, who reversed 12 years of flagrant deficit spending? We did, by…”

“That is not at all what I have done. First of all, who reversed 12 years of flagrant deficit spending? We did, by one-vote fights in both Houses in the most brutal fight anybody can remember. We did that. We walked the walk and took a lot of grief for it. And one of the reasons the Democrats lost this last session in this last election is because the Republicans convinced the voters that we raised everybody's taxes when what we did was raise taxes sharply on the top 1.2 percent, and a lot of those folks funded those campaigns. We took on the NAFTA fight. It was deader than a doornail when I became President, and we brought it back to life. We took on the NRA on the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. You may agree or disagree; no other sitting President had ever done it. So this ``walk the walk'' business is a bogus charge. On the minimum wage, Senator Kennedy, clearly a big supporter of the minimum wage, suggested to me before the State of the Union Address, he said, ``Instead of putting a number in there, why don't you challenge the Congress in a bipartisan fashion to come up with a reasonable number? If you say a specific number on your own, even though everybody knows you want to go to $5, if you say it, then the Congress, the Republicans may feel that they have to be for something else. Let them take credit for it.'' Now, I don't know who told you in this White House that I'm not going to push for it, but I'm going to push very hard for it. But I think--if you look at realistically where we are, we have a majority in both Houses in the hands of the Republicans. We have leaders in the Republican Party--the Republican majority leader says we ought to abolish the minimum wage altogether. I have to create the conditions in which we can raise the minimum wage if I possibly can. I want the Congress to do it in a bipartisan fashion. I want them to have a full share of credit for it. I will work very hard for it. But I don't want to waste a lot of time making strong posturing and undermining the chance that we can raise it. I want to raise it. I want it to get done. And I think in the end--Theodore Roosevelt said, who was a very good speaker, that in the end the measure of what we do should be what we do, not what we say. So I'm doing my best to actually get it raised. Entitlement Programs Mr. Brokaw. It seems to me, Mr. President, that one of your greatest challenges in the next year or so is to reconnect to those middle and working class families that have traditionally voted Democrat that have strayed now from the fold. Their children are going to be saddled with great debt as a result of the entitlements that are building up year after year. Why don't you take on entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare, in terms of getting the cost under control by not eliminating them and not reducing the benefits but maybe cutting back on the COLA's, the cost of living increase, taxing the wealthy more for Medicare, and saying to the country candidly, we have to do something about this?”