Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. If anyone ever asks you what do Carroll Campbell and Bill Clinton have in common, you could say…”

“Thank you very much. If anyone ever asks you what do Carroll Campbell and Bill Clinton have in common, you could say they have the same throat disease. [Laughter] He's doing better today than he was yesterday. I'm doing slightly worse. The good news is, you get a shorter speech. I want to thank you all for being here and for your common concerns. Yesterday we had a good meeting and especially, I thought, a very good discussion about the problem of crime in our country and the crime bill, the necessity to put more well-trained police officers on our streets and to take repeat violent criminals off the streets forever but also the necessity to be smart about the crime bill, to do things that make sense to you and to your law enforcement officials. Today, I want to talk a little bit about two other fundamental challenges that we face: health care reform and welfare reform. They are linked inextricably to each other. And in order to meet these challenges, we will have to have an open and honest partnership both in passing the laws and, perhaps even more important, in implementing them. We began our partnership, at least with me in this new job, about a year ago today when we had a very long and fruitful meeting at the White House. I think it ran in excess of 3 hours. That meeting resulted, among other things, in the approval of every major waiver for State health care reform that you have requested.…”