Bill Clinton: “Well, I think they manifested themselves in people's honest feelings that things are not going very well in this country…”

“Well, I think they manifested themselves in people's honest feelings that things are not going very well in this country and that they haven't gone very well in a long time and the alienation people feel from the political process and in the alienation they often feel from one another in the same neighborhoods and communities. There are real objective reasons for a lot of these problems. After all, for most people the work week is lengthening, and incomes are declining. The job growth of the country has been very weak. The crime rate is high, and there's a sense of real alienation there. And I don't think we can speak to them just with programs. I think that, in our different ways, that's what both Hillary and I were trying to say. The thing I was trying to say to the American people at the Cooper Union that I want to reiterate today is that you can never change if you have no belief in the potential of your country, your community, or yourself, and that the easy path is cynicism. The easy path is to throw rocks. The better path is doing the hard work of change. The thing I liked about what happened in the Ways and Means Committee this week is--not that I agree with every last change they made in the bill, although some of them actually made the bill better, all the fundamental principles were left intact--but we actually did something to move the ball forward, to deal with the deficit, to deal with the investment needs, to deal with--to go back to the other question that Mr. Lauter asked--to deal with the need to get more real investment in the inner cities and the rural areas of the country. We are doing things. And what I tried to do all throughout the campaign in talking about hope, in talking about belief, in trying to go back to the grassroots was to say to people, the process of change may be uneven and difficult and always controversial, but it has to be buttressed by an underlying belief that things can be made better. When the election returns in November--that I was not fully responsible for, there were two other candidates in that race--which showed a big increase in voter turnout, especially among young people, that meant to me that we were beginning to see the seeds of a change in attitude. As I said at the Cooper Union, when President Kennedy occupied that office, nearly three-quarters of the American people believed that their leaders would tell them the truth and that their institutions worked and that their problems could be solved. So there was a lot more elbow room there. You know, a year or 2 years could go by, people could be working on something with maybe only slightly measurable progress, but the country felt it was moving forward. That is what we have to restore today, a sense that it can be done. And it cannot be done by the President alone, but the President has to keep saying that, that faith is a big part of this.”