Bill Clinton: “Let me, first of all, say I have had several conversations in the last 2 months, leading up to and after the election…”

“Let me, first of all, say I have had several conversations in the last 2 months, leading up to and after the election, about what I believe is my responsibility and the responsibility of our administration to try to play a constructive role in making Washington the kind of city it ought to be. In the last 4 years, first Alice Rivlin and then Frank have worked hard to coordinate what our administration was doing in Washington. Henry Cisneros, for example, has done a lot of good work on homelessness here in Washington. The Commerce Department has taken some community- based initiatives. Even my Secret Service detail adopted a school in response to my request for people to do more in Washington. But we have not done as much as we can, so that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is that the American people need to understand the unique challenges facing Washington. Washington, DC, is really not quite a State but not quite a city. It is not quite dependent and not quite independent. And I think that is the source of a lot of the difficulties we face today. There is sort of a series of purgatories in which Washington has found itself over the years, and very often when functions are divided in responsibility, they wind up being nobody's responsibility and easy for people to avoid, therefore, the tough decisions that have to be made. So what--I have asked the Office of Management and Budget and Frank Raines in his capacity as head of this task force to review that. I was very impressed that the DC control board came out with a set of specific recommendations, and I want to review them and try to do two things: Number one, I want to respond to the financial recommendations that will come both from Frank Raines and from the DC control board. And number two, I want to think in a larger way about what kind of more systematic effort we can make to be a constructive force in the revitalization of Washington. This is a beautiful city. This is a city full of talented people. It has problems, but so does every other city in America. And I am convinced that a lot of these problems have been aggravated over time by the fact that--what I would call ``not quite'' factor: not quite a State, not quite a city, not quite independent, not quite dependent, and so there has just been too much gray area. And we have to try to resolve this and work through it. And I promise you a more serious effort.”