Bill Clinton: “Well, I don't know what each of you are doing or not doing now. But I will give you some examples. I'll give you three…”

“Well, I don't know what each of you are doing or not doing now. But I will give you some examples. I'll give you three examples. I think you should try to replicate in your communities the kind of conversation that Newsweek reprinted based on questions they asked Speaker Gingrich and me about what the role of Government is and what it should be. I don't think that we--I think both of us are a little bit frustrated about it, because we didn't know--we just answered questions, and then they had to turn it into an article, but it was the beginning of an interesting conversation about what the role of Government ought to be. The second thing I would advise is to take each one of these issues--I saw in the, I think it was in the Dallas Morning News, one of the papers today I saw, that I read had a portrait of a family on welfare. Take each of these big issues and try to figure out how to go from rhetoric to reality so that people can understand what all these labels mean. Because if all you hear about these debates is what sort of pierces through in 10 or 15 seconds on the evening news, chances are your opinion will be more dominated by the rhetoric. And if it happens to comport with the facts, that's fine, but if it doesn't, that's not so good. Newspapers can do that. Newspapers can analyze in depth real, hard evidence on various problems. And the third thing I think maybe you ought to consider doing is sponsoring conversations within your community of people of different political and racial and other stripes--just people who are different. Because we are running the risk--interestingly enough, we have more information than ever before, but the way we get it may divide us from one another instead of unite us. And I think it might be really interesting if all the newspapers in the country sponsored community discussions. I don't mean bring people like me or people who want to be President, or even maybe people from Congress in from outside, but I mean the people in your local community who would represent different political points of view and live in different neighborhoods and are from different racial backgrounds and have an agenda of common topics that are being discussed all around the country, and let people listen to each other and talk to each other. My experience has always been that the differences among us, except on a few issues, are not nearly as profound as we think they are. And then report that to your readers, because we have to establish some sense of common ground. If all of our public discourse is about segmenting the electorate and then trying to make sure that by election day you've got the biggest segment, and there's never an opportunity to redefine where we are in common, that may work okay in a stable time because the policies are more or less set, the direction is more or less set; nobody's going to veer too much one way or the other anyway. But in a time of real profound change where the information revolution has made all of us actors, it is important that we try to establish more common ground. So those would be my three suggestions. V-J Day 50th Anniversary”