Bill Clinton: “Well, I think in the information age, too much exposure and too much information and too much sort of quasi…”

“Well, I think in the information age, too much exposure and too much information and too much sort of quasi- information--I mean, you guys have to compete with near-news, too. It's like when we were kids, we'd drink near-beer. You've got all this information and a lot of competition among news sources, and then you're competing with the near-news. And there is a danger that too much stuff cramming in on people's lives is just as bad for them as too little in terms of the ability to understand, to comprehend. Which is why, again I say, I underestimated in my first 2 years the importance of continually not just--even the town meetings, one of the problems is--like yesterday in the Larry King thing--I don't know if you listened to it--I thought it was good. I loved doing it, but I found myself about three questions in, I said, No, no, no, no, I'm doing too much of the details of the specific issue they're asking without trying to keep putting it in the larger context. Because we need to develop sort of a common understanding. Now, people intuitively respond to that. When in Colin's book, he talks about the American family or if I talk about common ground or I say what it is that brings us together or Ross Perot says we shouldn't have politics or, you know, or when the leaders in the Congress make some outreach that they resonate to intuitively, but there's no sort of, ``Well, what does that mean at this time?'' which is what I'm trying to do. I had so many people on this trip, even at these fundraisers, come up to me and say that they were really glad they were there because they had been themselves trying to understand what was going on and make sense of it, to kind of incorporate it into their lives. Colin Powell and the Mood of the Country”