Bill Clinton: “First of all, thank you, Steve, and thank you, Alan, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here. This is meant…”

“First of all, thank you, Steve, and thank you, Alan, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being here. This is meant to be more of a conversation than a speech, and I want it to be so; I'll be quite brief. We have had a very good year as a nation, and we've had a good year here in Washington. And it was capped by the passage of what I think is an excellent balanced budget agreement, not only because it does bring the budget into balance for the first time since 1969, which is a long time to wait, and therefore changes the whole dynamic of what we talk about here in Washington--we Democrats have been literally paralyzed for years and years and years in the efforts to do what a lot of what we thought ought to be done because everything was seen through the prism of the deficit; not so anymore--but also because this agreement has some remarkable positive things about it, including the biggest investment in health care since 1965, most of which will go to insure 5 million children who don't have health insurance now; biggest investment in education since 1965, which will go to put more children in Head Start, to put computers in our schools and to hook them all up, all the classrooms and the libraries, to the Internet by the year 2000; and has the biggest increase in help for people to go to college since the GI bill was passed 50 years ago. And that's just part of what's in this budget. It's a very fine budget.…”