Bill Clinton: “No, what I underestimated was the extent to which what I thought was a fairly self-evident case, particularly after we…”

“No, what I underestimated was the extent to which what I thought was a fairly self-evident case, particularly after we stayed below the spending caps approved by this Congress, including the Republicans who were in this Congress last year, when we had already passed a budget resolution which called for over $500 billion in deficit reduction. When they had voted repeatedly for supplemental appropriations to help foreign governments, I thought at least four of them would vote to break cloture, and I underestimated that. I did not have an adequate strategy of dealing with that. I also thought that if I made a good-faith effort to negotiate and to compromise, that it would not be rebuffed. Instead, every time I offered something they reduced the offer that they had previously been talking to the majority leader about. So it was a strange set of events. But I think what happened was what was a significant part of our plan, but not the major part of it, acquired a political connotation that got out of proportion to the merits, so that a lot of Republicans were saying to me privately, ``Mr. President, I'd like to be for this, but I can't now. And we're all strung out, and we're divided.'' I think we need to do a reality check. As I said, what I want to know--let me go back to what I said--what I want to know from our folks and from our friends in the Senate, and Republicans or Democrats, is what could I have done differently to make it come out differently, because the real losers here were not the President and the administration. The real losers were the hundreds of thousands of people who won't have jobs now. We could have put another 700,000 kids to work this summer. I mean, we could have done a lot of good things with that money. And I think that is very, very sad. And it became more political than it should have. But the underlying rationale I don't think holds a lot of water, that it was deficit spending. That just won't wash.”