Bill Clinton: “I want to explain to all of you why I came here, and then I want you to talk to me a little bit. I spend an enormous…”

“I want to explain to all of you why I came here, and then I want you to talk to me a little bit. I spend an enormous amount of my time, as you might imagine, trying to do things that I believe will help our country meet the challenges we face today so that young people will have a better future. And it's obvious to me that even if I do the best job I could possibly do and have a good economic policy, even if we do everything we can at the national level with the passing of an anticrime bill or a welfare reform bill, even if I keep the country strong in terms of its national security relationship with other countries, unless young people have good, healthy, constructive lives at the grassroots level, the things that I do will not succeed in getting you the future you deserve. And I've been talking a lot in the last few weeks about how we can bring the American people together to get over all these partisan and other racial and income and regional divisions in our country and try to bring people together to solve problems. And every time I get a chance I tell people, look, there's not a problem in this country that hasn't been solved by somebody somewhere. And so I pledged a few weeks ago and I started doing this, that as I traveled around the country, in addition to giving speeches and talking to people--in fact, I just talked to this big Baptist convention--I would actually go visit places where people were solving problems and helping other people live their lives, to try to highlight it so people in other parts of the country would see it and say, ``Hey, I could do that, too. Hey, my kids can be better off, too. We can do this.'' So that's really why I'm here. So I want to give you the chance to educate me about what you're doing and what you think, maybe what else others like me could do to help you more. And I want, through that, to give you the chance to educate the country about what you're doing, so that people in other places that may not have a facility like this will take heart and maybe do the same thing. That's why I'm here. And however you all want to handle it, I'll be glad to--I just want to listen. [At this point, moderator Barbara Zeigler, founder and executive director of Teen Health Connection, invited participants to speak, and several patients shared their experiences with the center, explaining how it had helped them physically and emotionally.]”