Bill Clinton: “No. No, I mean, I think--you know, I don't agree with the decision he made on the budget bill. But I agree with the…”

“No. No, I mean, I think--you know, I don't agree with the decision he made on the budget bill. But I agree with the reasons he had for not liking the way it came out. I didn't like the way it came out. But I think we should have kicked it into the conference--the Senate did the right thing--so we could keep the process going. Because the Republicans have not offered any credible alternatives, so there's no basis for us to build a bipartisan coalition. I hope we never have another bill without a bipartisan coalition, because I'm not comfortable with that. But in general I think it's going pretty well. I mean, the other issues--you know, he never made any pretense. He never agreed with me on the gays in the military issue. He made it clear in the campaign. He made it clear during the transition. He made it clear after the election. And we wound up--he wound up in a place where I don't think he expected to wind up either. I mean, I think we moved this thing quite a long way. As a practical matter, if you read this policy, it differs from what I said in the campaign in only one respect: You still can't openly declare your homosexuality without some fear of being severed from the service. If you do that, the burden is then on you to demonstrate you are not going to violate the Code of Conduct. But I never said one word, not a word, about changing anything about the Code of Conduct. And yet the military leaders themselves decided to go further than they had ever gone in protecting the privacy and association rights of all members of the military in ways that Colin Powell summed up as a policy of ``live and let live.'' That goes well beyond anything I even talked about in the campaign. Senator Nunn endorsed that. The Joint Chiefs endorsed that. The House leadership yesterday endorsed that. So I'm very encouraged about where we are on it. Economic Program”