Bill Clinton: “I did. Of course, I did. To me, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the voting rights law, the open housing law, all…”

“I did. Of course, I did. To me, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the voting rights law, the open housing law, all those things, they were the pivotal events of my childhood as far as my citizenship goes--I mean, just the whole civil rights movement. Now I see that we do--at least on election day, we are all equal. As I said yesterday in Baltimore, tomorrow, whatever anybody thinks about all the challenges and problems we still have in America, every single person tomorrow is just as important as the President or the Speaker of the House or Mr. Gates at Microsoft or anybody else. Everybody shows up, and everybody's vote counts, unless you don't show up. You know what kinds of debates we've had here in Washington over the last couple of years; you know what the big issues are. And the real challenge here is that if this were a Presidential year, then African- American voters, Hispanic voters, working people generally--single mothers who have to work for a living and figure out how to get their kids to child care or to school and work through how to get to the polling place--all these folks would be voting. And it's clear, if that were the case, that we would win the congressional races handily, and we could change the direction of this country. We could end this last 8 months of partisanship we went through and really start building on the successes of the last 6 years. So what I've got to try to do is persuade enough people just to go out and vote, because this election is not an ordinary congressional election. This Congress will shape how the American people live in important ways for many years to come. Mr. Joyner. The African-American vote is real important.”