Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts - President Bill Clinton - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 3, 1993

April 25, 1993

Thank you very much. Frank, I am delighted to be here. You reminded me, when you said that I came last year to the Waldorf, that I was in Los Angeles last year on the day before this convention. And I was flying back, and I got somewhere around Las Vegas, and our plane malfunctioned. We had to go back to California, and I took the red-eye into the Waldorf. I've always thought that was why I was the first Democrat in 28 years to receive a majority of the newspaper endorsements in the last election. I was thinking today whether there was some stunt I could pull that would have the equal effect. |Laughter~

When Frank was giving me the introduction, he said it was just a year ago, and this young, charismatic Governor was out--I thought to myself, what happened to that guy? |Laughter~ You know, people ask me all the time whether there's anything really different about being President, and is it different from being a Governor or some other job? And it really is.

One of the things is that people walk around on eggshells all the time, and they're always trying to protect you, even from things that aren't necessarily in need of protecting. The other day I came down from the residence floor at the White House to the first floor. And I didn't know this, but my wife was having a meeting with some women there, about 30 of them, talking about health care, and the meeting just let out as I got off on the floor. I was going around the corner to another little room, and all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of 30 people whom I had never met before. I literally just walked out into their midst. So I shook hands with them, said hello. It was quite pleasant. And this young aide who was working there, a man who's a full-time employee of the White House, said, "Oh, Mr. President, I'm so sorry that I let you out in the middle of all those people." And I looked at him, and I said, "That's all right, young man, I used to be one." |Laughter~ That's the way I sort of feel sometimes.

I want to tell you how very proud I am to be here today with you, all of you who offer our fellow countrymen and women the information, the analysis, the range of opinions that they need to make decisions about their future.

I know that there's always a healthy tension between the people in public service and the press. And when I have bad days I remember that another President who had a few bad days with the press himself, Thomas Jefferson, said that if he had to choose between having a Government without newspapers or newspapers without a Government, that he would not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. I think that was on one of the days when he got a good press. |Laughter~

I want to say, in all seriousness, that I've had the opportunity over the last several years to read a fairly large number of newspapers from around the country. As all of you know, I believe very strongly that over the last 10 to 12 years the political system, which includes both parties, in many important ways failed our people. And oftentimes, it was newspapers of our country who continued to put the human concerns of people back at the center stage of public debate, reporting on the stagnation of living standards that created so much anxiety for the middle class and so much despair for the poor.

I think, in particular, of the incredible series run by the Philadelphia Inquirer, called "America: What Went Wrong?", and the detail in which that series documented what happened to the middle class in America as most families worked harder for lower wages and had more insecurity in the fundamentals of their lives.

But many other papers, perhaps all of them all across the country, issued various reports on other problems that were neglected for too long: how we went from a $1 trillion to a $4 trillion deficit in national debt in 12 years; how most of the gains, the economic gains of the 1980's went to people in the top 3 to 4 percent of income brackets; how we came to spend over 33 percent more than any other country in the world on health care and still had over 35 million people without any health insurance and millions of others at risk of losing it at a moment's notice; the problems we had in our school systems, our welfare systems; the problems we had with drug abuse and crime; the problems we have in the rising tide of people in what may well be for them a permanent underclass, most of them young women and their little children or young, single, unemployed and uneducated men.

Editorial writers warned us about organized interest having too much dominance over public policy, and the slogans and the smears and the sound bites having too much dominance over public debate and election decisions. Newspaper after newspaper reported on the profound disaffection of so many of our people from the political process itself. When the political system seemed brain-dead and deadlocked, with so many people locked into yesterday's rhetoric and yesterday's policies, many in the newspapers helped to give the American people not only the information they need but the sense that with that information, something profound could be done to change the course of our Nation's history.