Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, we are doing--I believe that the Democratic Committee is doing the right thing by returning any…”

“Well, first of all, we are doing--I believe that the Democratic Committee is doing the right thing by returning any contributions that were improperly tendered to it. And I certainly feel responsible to do that, and I would not tolerate their not doing it. Furthermore, I think Senator Dodd and Chairman Fowler did the right thing in trying to, if you will, develop a tighter screen for evaluating it. They acknowledged that they should have had a better screen, that they were--you know, as I said, they took in over a million contributions over 2 years from different people and that they found these relatively small number that were wrong and they should do it. And had that not been done, I would absolutely feel responsible for it, because I am a Democrat and I'm the titular head of the Democratic Party. So I'm not trying to disclaim responsibility, but I am trying to point out that there is--there's a difference between what the party does and what the campaign does. I'm also responsible for what the campaign does in that sense, but there is a difference. And the party should do the right thing and give any money back but--and I also pointed out again, the Republicans have their own problems here and have had some in both campaign and in party-raising--in Presidential campaigns and in party-raising. But all of them, when you add them up, it's--I'll say something in behalf of the Republicans--if they raise money from a million people over 2 years, it would not surprise me if 10 to 20 of those contributions did not meet the requirements of the law, or 30, and it would be a small percentage. And that doesn't mean that we ought to run them out of town on a rail. But what I do know is that if you have to raise this kind of money-- and they raised--what did they raise, $150 million more than we did; they raised $3 for every $2 we did--if you raise this kind of money, questions will be raised about it. And the only way to ever put this to rest is to pass campaign finance reform. We have a vehicle that I think is as good as any. There is no perfect solution to this, because of two Supreme Court decisions, one of which says nobody can limit how much money you spend on the campaign or how much of your money you spend; the other one appears to give a wide berth to these third-party expenditure committees. But still, the McCain-Feingold bill, with a modification to deal with the foreign contribution issue, would dramatically improve things. Now, I am for it; the Democratic Party is on record for it; the chairman of the Democratic Committee has challenged the chairman of the Republican Committee to endorse it. Senator McCain was very active in Senator Dole's campaign. It is completely bipartisan, and we have enough votes in our caucus in the Senate and the House to contribute to an overwhelming victory. So now the real question is, whether we get McCain-Feingold is solely within the purview of the leaders of the House and the Senate on the Republican side. If they'll go with it, we will do it lickety-split, and then we'll be able to talk about some other things down the road. Yes.”