Bill Clinton: “Let me just say, if I could follow up on that, one of the most important things about a democracy, a representative…”

“Let me just say, if I could follow up on that, one of the most important things about a democracy, a representative democracy like ours, is that the political system--when you quoted President Ford today, it was a great comment--the political system act when it's required to act, in a bold way, but that you have the trust of the people and the support of the people. And this is an interesting issue. This is a fairly complex issue. Now, I think the people have been ahead of the politicians as a whole in the sense that I think it's widely understood that there's a problem here, and therefore all of you want us to do something about it. On the other hand, there is a fairly small number of the political leaders in Congress, let's say, and there's a fairly significant number of people in the press, the people that are covering this, who've been thinking about this problem for a long time, and they know we need to do something about it. So all of us who are activists, you know, the tendency is that we want to go in a room now and just--you know there's a problem, so we'll fix out what to do about it. The nearest thing I can think of that we're trying to avoid happened a few years ago, before I became President, on catastrophic health insurance. I don't know if you remember this--and the AARP even got burned on this--where everybody in the country knew there was a problem, right? So the politicians figured, ``Well, the people all know there's a problem. The AARP says there's a problem. So we'll all sit down and do what seems like a reasonable thing and come up with a solution.'' And the public outcry was so great that a then-Democratic Congress and a Republican President had to undo what was done. Now, it was too bad, really, in that, but it wasn't catastrophic for the country. This is big-time business. We can't--once we do this, we have to do it, do it right, and we can't undo it. We've got to do this right, and so that's why we're doing it in this way. And I thank you for what you said, and I'll do what I can to try to--I've got an office in Washington, part of the White House, that deals with State and local officials. We'll work with the Congress and try to see how we can multiply these things. [An audience member asked how privatization would affect disability and survivors insurance and how supporters could be certain that people would indeed save when given the opportunity.]”