Bill Clinton: “Well, for years I felt like most people, I've been aware for a long--I began to talk about the wage stagnation and the…”

“Well, for years I felt like most people, I've been aware for a long--I began to talk about the wage stagnation and the relationship in the social disintegration and the wage stagnation at least 8 or 9 years ago, before I heard anybody else talking about it. I just studied--because I study data all the time. When I was a Governor and I was trying to restructure the economy, I just studied a lot of things that were--looked like boring numbers but could be made--but had real-life stories around them. But when I ran for President, I believed that if I had the right sort of economic policy, which was to grow jobs in the private sector and try to pursue strategies that will increase the number of high-wage jobs, facilitate defense conversion, and raise skill levels in the work force, we could grow jobs, grow entrepreneurs, and raise the incomes. I thought if we had a social policy that emphasized helping people to help themselves, helping people that need help but imposing responsibility and accountability, that we could reform welfare and do all these other things. And I thought if we had a Government that was strong but smaller and more entrepreneurial, that was more oriented toward results and less oriented toward regulation, we could build broad support for it. And we did all that. We had a huge amount of success in the first 2 years. And the Congress--the Democrats actually moved a long way-- however you want to say it--either to the center or into the future. But there was no perception of it on the part of the voters. Part of it the Republicans spent a lot more time and money on communication, as opposed to governance. But they hadn't been in the governing business for a long time, so they could do it. And part of it was that there was no way for people to feel it. They had these feelings about the way their lives were. And after the election was over, I basically spent--I spent a lot of time trying to understand what was driving the mind-set of voters in terms of what was happening in their lives and try to tie what's going on here to what's going on in the rest of the world. And I finally realized that the depth of the changes--you know, it's one thing to say it's a post-cold-war era, the global economy, the information age, and another thing to try to come to grips with the fact that the depth of the changes in the way we live and work and relate to each other and the rest of the world are, in my judgment, greater than at any time in 100 years. So I started looking for historical parallels. And it started with people saying, you know, this is going to be like Truman, all that kind of stuff--you know, what people say about '48. And I think the psychological dynamics are a lot like '48, where we had to come down off World War II, we had to make all these economic adjustments, there was no common--[inaudible]--to weld us together. If there was, it was-- [inaudible]--into exhaustion. The psychological dynamics were-- [inaudible]--but the underlying reality was different, because, basically, even in the Great Depression, we knew we had a great industrial country; we just had to figure out how to make it work again, how to get out of this Depression. But this is something different. The way we live and the way we work is really changing. And so I started going back into history, and I read--and I started trying to read things that would--triggered it. And finally, I realized, thinking about the beginning of the progressive era, basically, from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, that the same kinds of things were being done. We changed the way we live; we changed the way we work; we changed the idea of what the role of Government was; we defined our relationships to each other in different ways. We never had to worry about child labor on the farm; nobody would have thought of--a farmer couldn't let his kid work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week on the farm, except when he was in school, you know. And we changed our relationship to the rest of the world. I mean, when we got into World War I--it started with Teddy Roosevelt, even a little before Roosevelt, with the antitrust laws which said we were not going for socialism in the industrial age but we had to have competition to avoid the evils of a monopoly. Then we got into child labor. Then we got into the idea that we could destroy our natural heritage by abusing the environment--Teddy Roosevelt wanted to preserve the environment. And then Woodrow Wilson did a lot of other progressive things. We enacted the progressive income tax, to pay for things that we had to do together in an industrial society, that we couldn't do apart. And then, lo and behold, after this whole tradition of isolationism--the biggest war we ever fought was the one we fought with each other--we wound up having to come into World War I basically to ensure the victory of the good guys and what we believed in. And if you go back--and it took about 20 years. So if you look at the way things are today, you see the same sort of thing, with a lot of good things and a lot of bad things and all these anomalies. The economy comes back, the wages stay flat. The crime rate goes down, our juvenile crime goes bad. Peace in our time, with all these isolated acts of madness. And it's the same sort of deal. And so we have to work our way through it. And as President, one of my big jobs is--and I neglected that the first 2 years, I think. The first 2 years, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I went about doing them. And I was obsessed with doing them. A lot of it required the Congress to go along. And I would have been better served, I think, and the country probably would have been better served if maybe we had done--even if we had done just slightly less, if people had understood sort of the big picture more. And the President, in a way, has to impart that big picture. And there were times when I did it, like in that Memphis speech, for example. But if you go back and look at Lincoln's speeches, for example, he was always explaining the time people were living in and putting the big issues in terms of choices that had to be made, so that he basically never let the people off the hook.”