Bill Clinton: “If you all are willing to do it and you will help us figure out a way to structure it, I'll do it. Let me just give…”

“If you all are willing to do it and you will help us figure out a way to structure it, I'll do it. Let me just give you--I'll just give you one--outside this door, probably sitting there--I don't know if she's still there--is my diarist for the White House who has lately been in the paper because--[inaudible]--[laughter]--her name is Janis Kearney. Her daddy was a sharecropper, and her mother was a domestic. And they had 17 children; 13 of them have college degrees, 5 of them are lawyers, and all 17 of them have a first name that starts with the letter ``J''--I don't know how they--[laughter]--most of them went to school in Arkansas. One of them went all the way to Harvard. And some of them had affirmative action, and some of them didn't, and they all did fine. Look, somewhere in here there's a way that we can get to where we're trying to do--stop talking past each other and start working together. I cannot believe that 90 percent of the people in this country don't want the same kind of country in terms of racial matters. And I will do my best to find a way for us to move beyond the--[inaudible]--honestly and respectfully state our differences and figure out a way to work together. Because it is obvious, if you do not believe that there is any inherent, God-given difference among people based on race, then the differences that we have today must have been rooted in the mistakes that have been made in the past or the breakdown of social institutions or personal institutions like the family, the education system, and the networking of people in business and others. There has to be a way to rebuild those institutions, and we have to do it together. I think it would be a shame if we didn't try to do this together. I'm trying to put this beyond partisan politics. I'm not trying to use you. I said that deal about the athletics because I might have voted for the athletic thing, too, but I've always been with the race is like athletics and not different from athletics. That's all. So we need to go. If you have--in addition to your suggestions, which Governor Kean is for, I want to know if you've got process ideas about how we can discipline this debate and to move it forward.”