Bill Clinton: “First of all, you haven't heard me up there condemning the Speaker and Senator Dole in the kind of intense personal…”

“First of all, you haven't heard me up there condemning the Speaker and Senator Dole in the kind of intense personal terms that they have used. You haven't heard that. You have never heard me doing that. Secondly, I have--I did not end these budget negotiations. They did. Thirdly, whenever we sign--whenever I sign legislation that has bipartisan support, I always give them credit for the work they do for America. Now, I am not going to hide my differences from them from the American people, and I have never asked them to hide their differences from me from the American people. I don't ask Senator Dole to suspend his campaign or, you know, I don't ask him to stop doing--going around saying I was wrong when I fought for the Family and Medical Leave Act, which he says all the time, that I was wrong when I stood up for the assault weapons ban or the Brady bill, and he led the opposition to it. I don't ask him to stop that. All I'm saying is, we're supposed to show up for work here every day. And we were closer than was even reported in the press in the budget negotiations. Now they are adopting a strategy to say that ``we're going to use the lawmaking process of the United States to force the President to veto bills where the main subject of the bill he is really for, because we would rather have the veto''--and I think that's wrong--or, ``we're not going to permit people to get an increase in the minimum wage. We actually want the minimum wage to fall to a 40-year low.'' That's what they said. So if the Democrats in the Senate are going to one time use the filibuster position they have, which the Republicans used over and over and over and over again in '93 and '94, to an extent never before seen in modern history, more than had ever been done before--if they're going to do that, to demand a vote on the minimum wage, I have come here today not to play politics with them but to say, here is a way to balance the logjam. Let's have a clean vote on the temporary reduction in the gas tax. Let's have a clean vote on the minimum wage. Do that. It is the right thing to do. It's the right thing for America to do. Thank you.”