[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
[November 2, 1994]
[Pages 1956-1957]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1956]]


Interview With John Crane and Ann Nyberg of WTNH Television, New Haven, 
Connecticut
November 2, 1994

    Ms. Nyberg. Mr. President, thank you for being with us tonight.
    The President. Thank you.
    Mr. Crane. Thank you.

Foreign Policy

    Ms. Nyberg. You have just returned from an unprecedented preelection 
whirlwind Middle Eastern trip in the name of peace. Following the trip, 
polls shows your popularity up. Skeptics would say the trip was planned 
to boost not only popularity but know-how in the area of foreign policy. 
Your comments, sir.
    The President. Well, we worked for 2 years, very hard, on peace in 
the Middle East. I had no control over the timing of the Israel-Jordan 
peace treaty. Obviously, they made their own decision about when to 
sign. They asked me to come and witness it, because of the role the 
United States and our administration played in that. When I was there, I 
went to visit our troops in the Persian Gulf. I sent them there to 
counter Saddam Hussein's latest aggression. Clearly, I had no control 
over that. There was no politics in this trip. The American people know 
it.
    But the benefits that are coming in foreign policy, the nuclear 
agreement with North Korea, the work in the Middle East, the success in 
Haiti, they are the result of 2 years of hard work that happened to 
coalesce at this time. There was no politics in that, and there 
shouldn't be.

Midterm Elections

    Mr. Crane. Mr. President, here in Connecticut and across the 
country, Republicans are trying to make you the symbol of all that's 
wrong with Government. The pictures of you appear in many GOP television 
ads. Do you think this midterm election is really a referendum on you?
    The President. No, but I think that it is the culmination of 2 years 
of irresponsible conduct on their part, where they did their best to 
derail the Government, to put the brakes on everything, to oppose 
deficit reduction, to oppose our plans for economic recovery, to oppose 
our plans for things like family and medical leave and the crime bill. 
As a party, they did their best to wreck everything and then to blame 
us. But the American people are beginning to see through it.
    After all, let me put it to you this way. If I were a Republican 
President and I had followed policies which reduced the deficit, shrunk 
the Federal Government to its smallest size since President Kennedy was 
in office, increased the economic prosperity of the country, reduced the 
nuclear threat, expanded trade, and passed the toughest crime bill in a 
generation, they would be running me for sainthood. But because I'm a 
Democrat, they're engaged in a great disinformation campaign. And 
they've signed this contract to take this country back to the trickle-
down economics of the eighties, a decade which, I might add, was pretty 
rough on the State of Connecticut, along toward the end, with all the 
exploding deficits and other problems. So, I believe the American people 
will see through that. I've got a lot of faith in the people of this 
country to be positive, to be forward looking. And my job is simply to 
get out and give them the facts, and then they'll make the decision.

Child Support

    Ms. Nyberg. President Clinton, we want to go to the viewers now. As 
you can imagine, we asked them to give us questions for you; we were 
having a chance to talk to the President.
    The first question is from Andrea Wilson of Norwalk. Andrea wants to 
know, Mr. President, what you're going to do to make deadbeat moms and 
dads accountable and responsible for supporting their children.
    The President. I sent in the springtime a welfare reform bill to 
Congress which, among other things, has a much tougher mechanism of 
child support enforcement. I think we have to have more automatic 
requirements, more wage withholding, more respect for these child 
support orders across State lines. It has simply got to be easy to get 
the child support payments out there. We've got billions and billions of 
dollars of unpaid child support. And if we had it paid by people who can 
afford to pay it, the welfare

[[Page 1957]]

problem would be much smaller, and it would be a lot easier for people 
who are struggling to raise their children in dignity, to do it.

Job Creation

    Mr. Crane. Now for our second viewer question, Mr. President. It 
comes from a woman named Eva Nay, who wants to know why, if you made 
jobs one of your administration's top priorities, there are still 
layoffs and little in the way of job creation in Connecticut?
    The President. Well, let me see. I've got some figures right here; 
I'll check it. The national economy, since I became President, has 
produced 4.6 million new jobs. Now, the Government didn't do all that; 
most of these jobs are in the private sector. But we created the 
environment in which the jobs could be created by bringing the deficit 
down, by expanding trade, by investing more in new technologies. Not 
every American who wants a job has one, and of course, there's nothing 
the National Government can do to stop some companies from laying off. 
What our job is is to create more jobs than are lost, and we're doing 
that.
    But just a moment, let me check here. In Connecticut----
    Mr. Crane. Take your time.
    The President. Well, I'm looking here.
    The unemployment rate in Connecticut has dropped more than one 
percentage point. We've had several hundred new jobs added since I 
became President. In the previous 4 years--listen to this--Connecticut 
lost 150,000 new jobs. So, we've got job gain now, where we had job loss 
before. We need to create more jobs. We have to keep working on it. The 
first thing I had to do was to try to stop the job loss. And I think we 
have done that. We're moving forward.
    Ms. Nyberg. And our viewers will be happy to hear that.
    President Clinton, thank you very much for taking time out of your 
busy schedule in Providence, Rhode Island, to be with us tonight.
    The President. Nice to do it. Thank you.

Note: The interview began at 5:02 p.m. The President spoke by satellite 
from the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence, RI.