Bill Clinton: “Oh, I don't know. I think that for one thing if you throw something really controversial out there, and are new and…”

“Oh, I don't know. I think that for one thing if you throw something really controversial out there, and are new and different, it is very difficult for anything but the controversy to get constant coverage. And I don't say this so much about you but I mean, just in all the stories that compete for time on the national news. For example, let's suppose you're--and this is not a criticism more than an observation--suppose you are the producer of ABC News or wherever. You've got to put the flood on, right? The Israelis bomb the Bekaa Valley or attack the--you've got to put that on. So instead of, I mean, you can't go back through every night all the essence of the economic plan. And if our adversaries decide just to scream, ``taxes,'' it's just easier to cover that story and to get it in the timeslots you can cover it. I think that a big part of it is when there is just a huge volume of news and you've got somebody like me who's very much into trying to solve problems and get them out of the way, whether it's the test ban issue or the POW issue or the Northwest United States forest issue, I just try to take all these things and move through them. If you get something really controversial like gays in the military, it's not as if I had a chance to sit in the home in a fireside chat with the American people and walk them through my position and then walk them through why we came up with this compromise and why I think it is the principled, right thing to do. And on the economic plan, I think it's just clear, I think--let me just give you--Bernie Sanders from Vermont is an independent from Vermont, the only independent in the Congress. He called me the other day and he said, ``I have done you a terrible disservice.'' I said, ``What do you mean? You voted for me on everything.'' He said, ``That's what I'm telling you.'' He said, ``If the progressives in the Congress had burned you in effigy for all these spending cuts, then America would know you had made spending cuts. But because the entire Democratic Party and I rolled on the spending cuts, it was never newsworthy.'' They weren't newsworthy. The newsworthy thing was the fight over the taxes, so that even when the Republicans--they were so smart about it--when the Republicans in the Senate Finance Committee offered all kinds of things to water down the tax program, but they did not offer one, not one red cent in spending cuts, because they didn't want to take any tough decisions. They knew we already made a lot of spending cuts, and they just wanted a lot of attacks on the taxes. So I think, frankly, anytime you do hard things and you try to change, you have to expect to be misunderstood. But when you've got more than one thing out there at once, you have to really work on talking it through, which is why I think I should have been doing this from February the 18th until today, not just for the last month or so.”