Bill Clinton: “Well, I think in the end--let me say again, I think in the end we could have passed the bill if the Mexico City thing…”

“Well, I think in the end--let me say again, I think in the end we could have passed the bill if the Mexico City thing had been resolved. But I simply couldn't do that. I mean, I just couldn't do it. To me, first of all, I think it's wrong to mix these things. And secondly, I feel as strongly in principle on one side of the issue as the people in the House who otherwise might have voted for fast track do on the other. The prior problem was that we have, as I said, we have-- look at the Senate vote--we have a majority of Senate Democrats for fast track, a huge majority of the mayors and Governors who are Democrats. We don't have a majority in the House. And I don't know whether--what we could have done differently. Let me just say this. I think the bill that's there before them now, had we been able to persuade everybody involved that that bill should have been there months ago, maybe that would have made a difference. But it's easy to second-guess these things. The main thing is--the difference between this and health care was that health care was all caught up in politics and partisanship in even a more profound way, and there were big vested interests that had a stake in basically performing reverse plastic surgery on the proposal we made, and when it was dead, it was dead. This is not dead. I will be very surprised if we are not successful in developing a bipartisan, constructive, successful approach to fast track before this Congress is over. This is a big difference here. I feel that this is entirely different. And keep in mind, it's also occurring in a different context. It's occurring in the context of the country doing well, the economy being strong, and the Congress continuing to do productive things. So I'm going to sign a bill, an appropriations bill that has the biggest increase in education in decades, that funds the America Reads program, our program to put computers in schools, increased scholarships for people going to college, and that makes a huge step toward establishing national academic standards and national testing, something that everyone thought was dead just about 10 days ago and we worked out. So I'm basically very upbeat, as we move toward the break for Thanksgiving and Christmas, about the capacity of the Congress to work together and to work with me and to get this done. I wish we'd been able to pass it right now, but I expect it to pass.”