Bill Clinton: “It is. But as Mayor Archer always tells people, we need to keep doing what's working. We've got 88,000 more jobs in…”

“It is. But as Mayor Archer always tells people, we need to keep doing what's working. We've got 88,000 more jobs in Michigan than we had when I took office, and in the previous 4 years Michigan lost 8,300. So that's the message I've been trying to hammer home in Michigan and the message that I hope will carry Bob Carr to the Senate seat there. And it really is a function of how many people vote in Detroit. But if you look at it, I mean, African-Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do. If there is an overwhelming bias in what they see--based on conflict, failure, process, politics, and negativism, as opposed to just giving people the facts about what's going on--then you can't expect people to vote on what they don't know. The truth is, as Time magazine said last week--they put a chart up, and they said, since World War II there have only been three times, three 2-year periods, when the Congress has given the President more than 80 percent of what the President asked for: President Eisenhower's first 2 years, President Johnson's first 2 years, and this last 2 years. In other words, no other President since World War II, except Eisenhower and Johnson, has had more than 80 percent of the initiative approved 2 years in a row by Congress. The voters don't know that because that's not the message they get. A lot of people don't know about the family and medical leave law, about tax cuts for 15 million working Americans on low incomes with children, about immunizing all the kids in this country under the age of 2 by 1996, about the expansion in the Head Start program, about the empowerment zones for inner cities, about a lot of this stuff. So, what I've got to do in the last week here is get out and talk about what's been done and try to rev people up. Mr. Gordon. I want to do that. But one of the reasons that they perhaps don't know--and I agree and even your critics are suggesting that maybe you have not been given the praise you deserve for some things that you've brought to the table. But many of those bills and acts don't come in immediately, and it takes time to disseminate that money. And some of them are going to be disseminated by a totally different House and Senate, at this point, which could indeed determine where those monies go.”