On the recordJuly 29, 1993
I think until the last couple of weeks, the opposition did a better job than we did because they had a simpler job of selling it. We had some overtures to the Republicans, and especially in the Senate, before I even unveiled this program about whether there was a possibility of a real bipartisan effort to deal with this deficit. And we were basically told that if we were going to have any taxes on upper income people, they weren't interested. And they basically wanted to take it all out of Medicare and other things that we think there's a limit to how much you can cut. And we've cut Medicare as much or more than they have in the past but not as much as they wanted. So when you've got a program of spending cuts, tax increases that are overwhelmingly on the wealthy with an enormous number of economic incentives to grow, you'd think it would be quite popular. In fact, it is when people know the details of it. But what happened is, you had everybody from the Republican Senators to a lot of the House Members to Rush Limbaugh just trying to convince the American people that there were no spending cuts, no deficit reduction, and no taxes on anybody but the middle class. None of that was true. But it's a lot easier to bad- mouth something like that and just scream ``taxes'' than it is to deal with the specifics. Let me just give you one example. Just in the last couple of weeks, it's been very impressive to me that the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that's not editorially on my side often, that their news columns have repeatedly shown how most small businesses benefit from this program, but most of them didn't know. Their communications job, those that are against us, was simpler than ours, and we've only begun to do what we should in the last couple of weeks. But the more people know about this, the more likely they are to support it. The details of the plan are friendly to support; it's all this rhetoric that's hurt us so bad. Taxes
Source
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