Bill Clinton: “Thank you. Good morning. I want to thank you all for coming here and for being willing to help us with what is really a…”

“Thank you. Good morning. I want to thank you all for coming here and for being willing to help us with what is really a great problem for democracy. But as all of you know, we get a lot of mail at the White House. What a lot of people don't know is we're getting a lot more than anyone ever has. And by the time we had been here 3\1/2\ months, more letters had come to the White House than came to the White House in all of 1992. We're getting about 40,000 letters a day. We are desperately working to try to answer those letters with very limited staff. We've had already about 450 young people from the area agree to come in and help us in the past. But today I'm proud to say that there are over 800 young people who will be working today to help open and staple the mail that comes in here, so that then it can be read and sorted and answered. We have gotten over 3 million pieces of mail, with more coming. And that's good. But we have to answer all those letters. We have to let the American people know that they are being heard, and we're working very hard on it. And I might say, that's after we opened an E- mail channel, so we've got a lot of people coming in through E-mail. We've got extra phone lines on for people to call in, and we're still getting this much mail. So you are really going to help make democracy work today.…”