Remarks and a question-and-answer session with students at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 11, 1995

We just did a lot of things. And I think the most important thing I've done is to try to force the Government, and hopefully the American people, to keep looking toward the future and to say, "Okay, here are these problems. Let's take them on. Let's move into the future."

Even the major effort I tried that failed, to try to provide health insurance for all American families, even though I failed to do it, a lot of the things that I advocated are now happening anyway. And I think that the President is supposed to be someone who tries to bring the American people together around good values and high hopes and then to get people looking toward the future. You know, work together and work for tomorrow. And I think that largely I have achieved that. And that's what I intend to continue to do.

Student. Since you've been President, what's the hardest decision that you've had to make?

The President. That's a very good question. Interestingly enough--let me tell you, first of all, interestingly enough, the hardest decisions are often not the ones that you would think. They're often not the ones that are most controversial.

Let me just mention two. One Mr. Dooley was involved in. I think the--I'll mention two that were very hard for me.

One was right after I became President I was told by the Republican leaders in the Congress that they would not vote for my budget; none of them would vote for it, no matter what I did to it; that they wanted a partisan issue and that if I tried to bring the deficit down, if it didn't work, they would blame me, and if it did, they would say, well, I raised taxes in '93 to bring down the deficit. So I had to pass an economic program--I had to put together an economic program that would bring our country's deficit down by $500 billion only by members of my own party. And we had to make all kinds of decisions about what it would take to do that, including some things that I didn't necessarily agree with.

And that was very hard for me because I went to Washington determined to work with Democrats and Republicans. And I was shocked to find out how partisan it was. And it was very hard for me--I mean, I was shocked to find out people say, "Well, I'm just not going to work with you because you're in the other party. I'm just not going to do it. We have to oppose you. That's the political thing to do." It turned out that they were right. It helped them politically. But that was very hard for me to accept and very hard for me to deal with and then to figure out what to do to pass the program, but we did it.

And because we reduced the deficit and reduced interest rates and invested more in education at the same time, and gave California and other States some money to deal with the impact of base closing and defense cutbacks, we got the economy going again. But it was hard. It was really, really hard.

And the other thing that was--sort of the hardest thing to do was to decide what to do, how to deal with Bosnia. For a long time it was very difficult because I think the United States has to work within the United Nations and within the rules set within the United Nations for a problem like Bosnia. But its hard for us when we're the strongest country in the world, when other countries are--don't do what we think they should do. And we have no way to make them do it because we didn't have soldiers there. But that was very hard for me.