Bill Clinton: “This is a live event. Now listen, you all have to be respectful. I just saw CNN describe this as a live event.…”

“This is a live event. Now listen, you all have to be respectful. I just saw CNN describe this as a live event. [Laughter] To none of your surprise, I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Mike McCurry as the Assistant to the President and the White House Press Secretary. He has done a very fine job representing our administration at the Department of State since I took office. He has dealt with the wide range of very sensitive, complicated, and difficult issues, and he's done it very well. He has almost two decades of experience here in Washington, but to give you an idea of the kind of person he is in spite of that, the only pictures on his wall are the pictures of his wife and his two children. And they have a third one on the way. Debra and Mike told me on the way out here that they were the embodiment of the family values of this administration. [Laughter] And let me say I appreciate the personal sacrifice that both of them are making for Mike to do this job. Legislative Agenda Before I turn the podium over to Mr. Panetta and officially welcome Mike McCurry, let me say that, as all of you know, I had my first meeting today with the new bipartisan leadership of the Congress. I was very pleased with it in terms of tone and substance. I congratulated them in the House on passing the bill that requires Congress to live under the laws it imposes on the private sector. That bill passed the House last year by a similar margin, but it didn't pass the Senate. I hope it will this time, and I pledge to sign it quickly. I'd also like to see further movement on political reform in areas where we clearly agree: the line-item veto, the unfunded mandates issue. We can do a lot of business together for the benefit of the country. The other thing that happened in the meeting today that really impressed me was an acknowledgement by the Members of the Congress who have been here for years and years in both parties that they made a mistake back in 1981 to adopt a bidding war in the tax cuts that gave us what became known as ``trickle-down economics'' and quadrupled the national debt. And they agreed that we ought to have a limit to how much we cut revenues, determined by how much we can pay for that with spending cuts, so that there is going to be, apparently, no attempt to go back to what I call trickle-down economics, to exploding the deficit and a ratification of the work of the last 2 years in reducing the deficit by $700 billion, which is about $11,000 a family in this country. I was happy with that result. I think there will be a lot of other things we can do, but I hope now that the House has taken one vote in the reform area, they will keep on going with the line-item veto, with the unfunded mandates legislation, and hopefully, too, with lobby reform and other reforms. I'm sorry the lobby reform legislation didn't pass yesterday, but it can pass on its own merits, and it's a very important part of what we need to do to restore the confidence of the American people in our Government here. Thank you very much.”