Byron Dorgan: “I know the Senator comes from a reasonably small town in South Dakota. I come from a much smaller town in North Dakota.…”

“I know the Senator comes from a reasonably small town in South Dakota. I come from a much smaller town in North Dakota. I have said on several occasions that in my hometown, like most hometowns, we have a couple of people who get up in the morning and go down to the bar and play pinochle all day. They are retired. They sit around and play pinochle and enjoy life. The fact is, they sit around and play pinochle and complain while other people are out doing other things, like figuring out how to pave Main Street. Almost nothing satisfies them. There are people like that in every hometown, and there are people like that in Congress. The fact is, there is no amount of good news that can satisfy the people who are bent on having a bad day. I find it interesting that we went through part of the eighties and some of the nineties going in the wrong direction, and everyone was standing up and saying, 'Gee, we were right on course; the deficit was continuing to escalate, the Federal debt was continuing to grow and mushroom.' Everybody said, 'Well, we're right on course.' But we weren't on course.”