Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much, Professor Bailyn, for that wonderful, wonderful lecture. I thank the First Lady and Ellen Lovell…”

“Thank you very much, Professor Bailyn, for that wonderful, wonderful lecture. I thank the First Lady and Ellen Lovell for conceiving this entire Millennium series. The others will have a hard act to follow. I can't think of a better way to inaugurate this series of lectures than with one on the founding of our Republic, also the first White House cyberspace lecture. We are truly imagining--honoring the past, not by imagining the future but through the prism of the future. I thank Bernard Bailyn for what he said and the way he said it and for a lifetime of work. We received the distilled wisdom tonight of more than four decades of hard thinking and work about what it means to be an American and what America means to Americans and to the rest of the world. I was rather amused--he said, ``You know, when we started, we had all these people who came from a lot of different places; they moved around a lot; they disagreed a lot; they were disdainful of Government''--I thought, what's new? [Laughter] But they were also, as Professor Bailyn said at the end of his remarks, at their best moments profoundly idealistic and always, always appropriately suspicious of untrammeled power in the hands of anyone in the Government. They were very wise about human nature, our Founders. They understood that there was light and dark in human nature. They understood that we are all imperfect, but society is, nonetheless, improvable. And in some ways, I think their most important charge to us was to always be about the business of forming a more perfect Union. As I said in my State of the Union Address, they understood it would never be perfect but that we always had to try to make it more perfect. And that is what they always tried to do, and when they left the scene, they instructed us to follow suit. And we've been at it ever since. We have a lot of questions that we have to face about the new millennium: We're more diverse than ever before; can we really be one America? How do we have a Government that is flexible enough and strong enough to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives and still avoid the abuses that the Founders understood would always be there when people were too driven by power, instead of the larger purposes of America? How can we widen the circle of opportunity to include everyone in a market system that seems inherently exclusive in some ways? There are lots of other challenges facing us, but I think our ability to meet the challenges of the 21st century rest in no small measure on our understanding of the constant values and insights with which we began. By honoring the past, we know there were forebears there who were always imagining the future. By imagining the future, we must do so with the hope that all of our successes will honor our past, for it is there, in the depth of our values and the genius of our system, that we began the long journey that has brought us to this day and that I am convinced will take us to better days ahead. Thank you again, Professor Bailyn. And now I'd like to turn the discussion over to the Director of the White House Millennium Council, Ellen Lovell, and we will begin with the questions. [At this point, the question-and-answer portion of the program proceeded.]”