Bill Clinton's Hidden Life

Those questions of public character ought to be the keystones of this election. If you look back in history, our best presidents were not blameless but were subject to a totally different standard and demonstrated public character, a commitment to certain things that got done that made a difference. So I don't mind discussing all this. But there is certainly no reward for being candid. In spite of all the press commentary, I think I win the candor contest, and it looks to me like it's all downside.

His governorship. I learned the hard way when I was defeated in 1980 that you have to really have priorities and make them clear to people. If you do a zillion things, even if you do them well, people may perceive that you haven't done anything. I need to relearn that in this race apparently. And I learned in politics, you'll be useless if you have no vision, nothing you're trying to do. But you can also be rendered useless if you ignore everybody else's vision. You have to spend time listening, bringing people along. You don't hire a dictator to tell people what to do. Since 1980, I know some people have said, "He became too cautious." But I think I accomplished more lasting change since I got beat.

The Republicans always say money doesn't matter until they start measuring somebody from a poor state. Then they want to rank him in money terms. I've kept our tax burden in the bottom five as a percentage of income—state and local taxes. We rank third in the nation in percentage of money we put into education, fifth in ratio of computers to kids in the schools. We're above the national average in college-going rate, though our income is only 47th. My answer to the Republicans is that in the last 12 years America has gone in the wrong direction and Arkansas in the right direction. It's pretty hard in a poor, rural state with no help from Washington to do that. My simple message is this: Politics is not about miracles; it's about direction. And the country's going in the wrong direction. Hire me.

Lessons from campaigning. I now know things that once I only imagined. For example, I know living in Arkansas is different from living in Florida or California or New York. I now know that our diversity is either the source of our great strength or the instrument of our undoing. I know that there are a lot of people who are real winners out there in this tough global economy, who are making good things happen, who prove that this still is the greatest country in the world and that what we have to do is to find a way for more of us to do that.

And I guess the thing that surprised me most of all—although I should have known this—is that underneath all the incredible diversity of America, there is a core of common caring and concern; we're a lot more alike than I think we think we are. That's the real tragedy of all these racial problems. The American people are so much more alike at a human level than they think they are, from how much they love their kids to how badly they want to be safe, how concerned they are about their jobs and their futures. I'd like to be remembered for making people really believe that we're all better off when we define our lives in terms of our common purposes, for really helping to re-establish a sense of community and bridging the troubled waters of race—particularly race—and all the other things dividing this country. I think life is lonelier than it ought to be in America because we are so isolated from one another.

My basic read on this is that inevitably about once a generation there's a crisis in any country and especially one that has our historic position, that's as big and diverse as we are. If you could look at it from any reasoned perspective, as tough as the deficit is and as tough as the underinvestment in America is—which I think is an even bigger problem and closely related to the deficit—the thing that's killing us now is our own skepticism and our vulnerability to being diverted from how we're going to rebuild America, how we're going to reunite America. What's killing us now is our vulnerability to being divided and diverted and cynical. But, objectively, the problems we face, as great as they are, are certainly no greater than those of previous generations. And to me, if we could say, OK, both parties have let the country down in many ways, the system in Washington is too paralyzed by organized interests and too dissipated by the lack of vision and driving leadership from a president, so we got to fix it. I just wish I could figure out a way to get America out of her deep funk. When you look at all the great things this country still has—the human resources, the material resources, the people out there winning against all the odds—this is not a time for pessimism. But it is a time for action.