Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Governor Romer, ladies and gentlemen. I felt pretty good sitting at that table…”

“Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Governor Romer, ladies and gentlemen. I felt pretty good sitting at that table although that's my real place over there. [Laughter] We had a wonderful meeting yesterday, I thought, for a long time, maybe the longest time a President has ever met with a group of Governors, but we were discussing a terribly important issue: health care. And then we also got to discuss the deficit crisis and the budget problems a little bit. I wanted to come here today, as you prepare to leave, to once again reaffirm my commitment to working in partnership with the Governors. You deal with real people in a more immediate way than, unfortunately, the President often gets to do. When I was a Governor, every day I would hear directly from people or see people who had suffered from layoffs or had their businesses closed down or who were afraid of losing their health coverage or who desperately wanted to improve their schools. As you and I learned from last year's elections, the only pattern was not a partisan one. It was a pattern of determination on the part of the American people to have their political system and their Government address their real concerns. They don't want our process divided by partisanship or dominated by special interest or driven by short-term advantage. They know things that have too often been forgotten here over the last dozen years.…”