Bill Clinton: “Because this is America and people usually do the right thing, and because we've been around here for a long, long time.…”

“Because this is America and people usually do the right thing, and because we've been around here for a long, long time. Now, I know that at least in reading between the lines, it appears that the extreme conservative wing in the House continues to move the Speaker back and affect what happens in the Senate and make the possibility of honorable compromise more remote. But I believe in the end, that's the right thing for the country. My goal, I will say again, and what I try to capture from time to time, sometimes not too well, as we see, is that if you have two people who both make a good-faith effort at reaching a common stated goal, the balanced budget in this case, and they have different approaches, if they get together in genuine honesty and openness--I think there's a way for me to meet their stated objectives, which is a balanced budget in 7 years with a family tax cut, and I think they want a capital gains tax cut and extending the Medicare Trust Fund until 2006, and for them to meet our stated goals, which is to maintain our commitments to our investments in education and our obligations to the elderly through the Medicare program and to the elderly and our children, the disabled people in America through the Medicaid program, and our obligations to the environment and to technology and to the things that will make our economy grow--we can both meet our objectives. And if we do it in good faith, we might wind up with a budget that is better than either one of us proposed. That's what I hope will happen, and I'm going to leave the door open for that. But meanwhile, my job is to protect the American people if something happens that I think is very wrong. And I think the Medicare budget is wrong for America. Presidential Commission on Race”