Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine - part 2 - President Bill Clinton - Interview

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 11, 2000

Mr. Wenner. What's your bottom line on Newt, historically? I mean, what's your--if you were an historian, what would you say about Gingrich?

The President. That he was immensely successful in, first of all, consolidating the power of the Republican Party and its right wing and then in winning the Congress, winning the historic struggle for Congress in '94 by opposing me right down the line. And in '94, the people--the economy was getting better, but people didn't feel it yet. The budget we passed did not impose great tax burdens on ordinary Americans, but they didn't know it yet. And the crime bill we passed was going to help bring the crime rate down without interfering with people's gun rights, but they didn't know it yet.

So you had the best of all times to run through a gaping hole. And then I had made the mistake of trying to do both, trying to do the economic plan and NAFTA, which dispirited some of our base supporters. And then I tried to do health care under circumstances that were literally impossible. You could not get a universal coverage plan passed through Congress.

So I made a lot of errors, and he ran through them, and he therefore changed the Congress. Then I think people will say that we had one of these historic battles that periodically happens in America about the role of the National Government and, indeed, what the meaning of the Nation is.

And I think he thought he could actually carry out the revolution that President Reagan talked about, you know, drastically shrinking the Federal Government, drastically limiting its ability to act in the social sphere and moving it to the right.

And to me, we had a series of baffles that were really the latest incarnation of this ageold battle of what does it mean to be an American, what is the idea of America, what is the purpose of a nation? And there was a Government shutdown. There was an impeachment. There was my veto of the Newt tax bill after Newt was gone. All these were ongoing battles.

The battle over--the same thing is now happening, shaping up over the courts. The most important issue in this election may well be what happens to the courts. Because there is now already--we are one vote away from having enough votes that would repeal Roe v. Wade.

But there is this other issue in the courts which I think is quite profound, which is, there are five votes right now to restrict the ability of Congress to require the States to participate in protecting the American people in a lot of fundamental ways. So I think this is an ongoing battle.

But it's the same battle that we had between George Washington and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall on the one side and Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne, and a lot of other people on the other in the beginning; the same battle Abraham Lincoln had around the time of the Civil War. Could the States secede? Did the Federal Government have the power to enslave them? The same battle we had at the dawn of the industrial revolution when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson asserted the authority of the Nation to proscribe basic conditions in the workplace and protection. And it was the same battle that Franklin Roosevelt fought. That was the fourth time it was fought. Now we're in the fifth battle over how to define America. And in the first three skirmishes, we won. But I see that as a big issue in this election, a huge issue.