Bill Clinton: “He's only been out of uniform for a few days, and he's already off schedule. [Laughter] I would like to stay very much…”

“He's only been out of uniform for a few days, and he's already off schedule. [Laughter] I would like to stay very much until at least 1:30, until we hear from everybody. Thank you very much, General. Let me say, I think--I wanted you to hear from these three students. Now, I'd like to come back and sort of pick up the issues, starting with--Karen talked about school violence, and I would like to call on a couple of people now to discuss how they have dealt with it. Carl Cohn is the superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District in California. It's the third largest school district in California; there are 81,000 students in this school district. And 2 weeks ago, I went to his school district to one of the schools there, named for the great American baseball player Jackie Robinson. And he was, as far as I know, the first major school district in the country to implement for elementary and junior high school students a school uniform policy. I went out there because we had worked, particularly through the Attorney General's office and through the Department of Education, through Secretary Riley, to make sure that the school district and that others who wish to do the same thing could do so legally, explain how it could best be done, and then put together a handbook which you could then mail to every school district in the country explaining how Long Beach had done what they've done and how a school district who was interested in this could do it. And when I first heard about it and, indeed, when I mentioned it in the State of the Union Address, my last State of the Union Address--I always try to keep up with the reaction--on balance, it was the most positive reaction I ever got, except for all of the nasty letters I got from kids saying, ``How dare you suggest that school uniforms would be a good thing. It would be the most boring, awful thing that ever happened; our liberties would be trampled.'' And in one fell swoop, one remark, I turned myself into an old fogey before the entire country. But I must say, having gone out there since the State of the Union, I think that at least every American needs to hear about the Long Beach experience, particularly in light of what Karen said and others have said. So, Carl, the floor is yours. [Mr. Cohn said that since introducing the uniforms, there had been a dramatic reduction in school crime at the elementary and middle school level.]”