Q: How has the presidency changed you?

Photograph by Platon

CLINTON: Well, I think doing the job has changed me for the better. I think it has made me more knowledgeable, more able, probably a little more wise. I will leave the office more idealistic about America and its possibilities than when I entered it. And because I labored from the first day I was in office, and even in the campaign, under a virtually unprecedented barrage of attack, both political and personal, it helped me to develop a certain discipline and a certain humility about--that it made me sort of get up and go to work every day no matter what else was going on. And it was hard, it didn't come easily. There were days when I was angry and days when I gave myself a pity party. But I worked through it, and it was, on occasion, almost surreal. But it also enabled me to learn all those old lessons--it's not what happens to you, it's how you react to it; no matter what people say to you, you can't define how you view the world--all those old lessons I really had to learn on a daily basis.

And so I think that it helped me personally to be a better person, to be constantly judged and condemned and torn apart, then to have to confess error and be publicly humiliated and all that--it really helped me a lot, because I think that one of the greatest sins of character almost everybody is vulnerable to is pride. And we all tend to look at other people who do things we don't agree with or think are bad things and say, well, whatever is wrong with me, at least I'm not that. And I think sometimes we are too harsh on other people because it's like a crutch, we don't have to deal with whatever is going on in our lives. And I think it has really helped me to be less judgmental and less hypocritical. So I think in a funny way, even the bad parts of this, the experience, was quite good for me, and I think it will make me a better person for the rest of my life.

Q:How do you think you've changed the presidency?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I think we'll have to wait and see. Whether I changed the presidency depends upon how other people conduct it. But I think that if you look at the campaigns that both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush are running, I think that we involved ordinary American citizens and ordinary American heroes to a degree that was unprecedented. President Reagan used to have them in the box at the State of the Union address, but I had real people making policy points.

And I think the connection of what we do in Washington to how people live is closer than it has ever been, because of the way we conducted the business of government.

The White House and, in a larger sense, the nation's government matter to the American people. I think that in breaking the back of the Gingrich revolution and cutting through a lot of the meanness and antipathy toward the government per se that existed--which I think also Oklahoma City had a lot to do with, breaking the back--I think that it's much harder to, at least overtly, practice the politics of division than it was. The president is supposed to be a unifying force, not just in rhetoric but in fact.

I think that there are a lot of practical things we changed. I believe that no future president will be able to have a White House that doesn't have a National Economic Council that coordinates all the various parts of the government to deal with economics. It's something that, unbelievably, had never really been done in a disciplined way before. We really had all of our economic players--Treasury, Commerce, Trade and Small Business--and we worked together in a disciplined way.

You know, when I became president and people were saying, Well, the government is not so important anymore because the private sector is really driving the global economy, and, therefore, government will become increasingly less relevant, what I thought was that the government, to matter to people, had to be different than it was in the industrial era. That it was less important, in terms of directly creating jobs, hiring people, making sort of command-and-control decisions for the economy, but that it was even more important for the government to be--to create the conditions in which Americans can flourish in the global economy and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives.

I think that the presidency--our presidency I think was as activist as any since Roosevelt and maybe Johnson, over a broader range of areas. And so I think that people will see the presidency as a place of enormous potential.

So I think we changed the nature of presidential activism, almost as a byproduct of trying to prepare America for the whole new way of living that the Information Age is bringing. It's not just the global economy, but the way people make a living, the way they relate to each other and the way we, as Americans, relate to the rest of the world.

And we proved, once again, that ideas have consequences and that it is possible, if you get a good team together and you don't worry too much about who gets the credit and everybody tries to work together, you can really get a lot done, even in an adverse political environment, even with the Congress of the other party. But you have to work at it every day in a very systematic way.

I did make a studied effort to change the way the American people felt about the government, to make it seem less distant, less alien, less tone-deaf. Depending on the issue and the year, I guess we succeeded in a greater or lesser degree. But I think on balance most folks thought I was pulling for them. And that's what I feel now when I go around and just work the crowds and speak.

The other thing that bothered me about presidential politics is that too much of it had become image, positioning, how you are in the media, what happens in the thirty seconds on the evening news four times a week. And this may sound kind of old-fashioned, but to a large extent it really is a job like other jobs. It matters whether you work smart; it matters whether you work hard; it matters what you work on; and it matters whether you've got a good team.

People ask me all the time, Well, how did you all keep going every day when all this stuff was going on; not just the impeachment but before that--Whitewater, the relentless other attacks, that kind of stuff. If you get up every day and you treat it like a job and you remember who you're working for, you can still get results. And I think that future presidents will be able to look back on that, and I hope take some heart and courage from it. And if they have a mission and they understand what they're doing and they understand that they're doing it for the American people, and all the intermediaries are just people that--they're doing their role, but you've still got to keep doing the fundamental job--I think and I hope that people will perceive the presidency as more effective and more impactful on their daily lives in a positive way for a long time to come.

Q: In a way, is it fair to say that you took the presidency back from the two parties and gave it to the people?

CLINTON: Well, our party hasn't had it much for the last thirty years before I got it. But I did try to give it back to the people. I tried to give [it back to] people that weren't ideologically estranged from me, about whom I could do nothing, I couldn't help that, but the other two thirds, I tried to at least give them the feeling that whether they agreed or disagreed with any particular decision I made, that at least we were on their side, that we got up every day trying to do something that would help them to have a better life, and their kids to have a better future.

Q: Do you feel even now that you haven't finished, that there's more to be done?

CLINTON: There has been a lot of commentary, even from some of our critics, saying what a good last year we're having, how much is getting done, both in the Congress and by executive action, and the level of activism of the administration. But I never bought that idea that part of the inherent rhythm of the presidency was to wind down in your last two years. It seems to me that the times demand a level of activism if you're conscientious. I mean, this is a very dynamic time, and my goal is to leave this country in the best possible shape, with the largest number of options available to my successor, and to work until the last day to get that done.

And then what I have to figure out is how I can be an effective citizen, an effective force for the things I believe in when I get out of here, without getting in the way of the next president. I entered the environment which was unprecedented, where the other party decided that from the moment I took my hand off the Bible, taking the oath of office, they would try to delegitimize me. And I don't want to do that because I don't think that's good for America. I don't think that's right.

I hope and I believe that Al Gore will win this election. But even if someone that you dearly want to succeed you wins, that person won't be you and there will be different things, different nuances, different priorities. And I think it's very important that a former president--I don't think you should check your convictions at the door or gag yourself for life, but I do think that the new president should have a real chance to get going, and then you should be at the service of your country if the president ever wants you to do anything.

But I also believe that there are things I can do when I leave here to continue to work for the causes that I have championed, to solve the problems that I've tried to reduce in the country and in the world that won't get in the way of the next president. I just have to work that through. I really haven't--I've thought about it quite a lot, but I haven't reached any final conclusions and I don't think I should until I leave.

Q: Some presidents, including LBJ, seemed to go through serious, real depressions when they left office. Are you worried?

CLINTON: Yes, I have this recurring nightmare that for the first four or five months after I leave office, I'll be lost every time I enter a room because nobody will be playing a song. [Laughter.] I won't know where I am.

I think the answer to that is to find--and it will be different for different presidents, who are at different points in their lives. But if I stay healthy, I should have quite a number of years left. I'll be, I think, the youngest president to leave office since Theodore Roosevelt. And he lived another ten years after he got out, because he had some health problems.

President Carter has now had twenty marvelously productive years. And I think that's a pretty good model. What you have to do is find out what you care about and try to apply yourself to it, and not live just with your memories. I think it's important that the president be kind of a source of living history and be willing to kind of revisit what happened in the term of his service--and maybe even write a book or two about that.

I think about today and tomorrow, and I expect I will until my last day on earth. And I'll leave history to others. I might--I'll probably write one book or maybe two. But I'm basically, to the people and the commentators and people that write about me, I might be just as good as dead the day I leave office. But that's not the way I look at my life. I did this. I'm profoundly honored and grateful that I had a chance to do it. I did the best I could and I think the country is better off.

But I now have to get up in the morning of January 21st and make a different life, and I intend to do that. And I hope it will be a good and useful life for me and for my wife and for my daughter and for the things that I care about. I'm actually looking forward to it. It's an interesting challenge and I hope I'll be up to it.

Q: Janet Reno told Tom Junod, another Esquire writer, that when she's done she's going to get in her pickup truck and drive across country. I was wondering if you still have your Mustang?

CLINTON: I do, actually. And I think they've fixed the steering on it. I parked it at the Winthrop Rockefeller Museum of Automobiles. Our former Arkansas governor, Winthrop Rockefeller, had a wonderful collection of old automobiles, and I put it there. And I've only driven it once, at the Charlotte Speedway, at a Mustang reunion in '94, since I've been up here.

Q: Is that the only time you've driven as president?

CLINTON: No, I drove one day at Camp David, when I was teaching my daughter to drive, inside a two-mile compound I drove a little bit. I'll probably have to get contacts if I want to drive again. I just use reading glasses now, but I'll probably have to improve my eyesight.

I loved to drive when I was a kid. I used to drive across the country all the time when I was young. I never tired of it. I love to get in the car and go by myself somewhere, just drive. So I identified with your road story. [Paterniti is the author of Driving Mr. Albert, the story of a drive across America with the actual brain of Albert Einstein in the back seat.] I always love that, just stop in strange places, talk to people.

And that's why--it was one of the ways that I was affected as a politician in Arkansas, because it was a rural state with a lot of roads and a lot of people out there on those roads, in small clumps. That's the way I related to it. I even like it now sometimes when we drive, instead of fly, through little towns, and I can stop and do things. That's one of the things that prompted me to want to do those bus trips in '92 and in '96.

So I don't know. I wouldn't mind doing that if--I kind of wanted to take a trip with my wife and daughter around the world, just travel for thirty or forty days after I got out. But if Hillary wins the Senate race--and I think she will--then that's probably not a practical alternative. She needs to be getting ready to do her job.

Q: What was going through your mind before and during the 1999 State of the Union address, which you delivered in the very chamber where the House had voted for your impeachment just weeks earlier?

CLINTON: I thought in the beginning it would be sort of like the talking dog--you know, the guy can stand up and talk, and if he doesn't fall all over himself and collapse, he gets an A for effort. But I wanted to do more than that.

I felt two things. First of all, I realized that I had to just purge myself of any thought of anger at them and of any concern about what they were going to do and of any personal feelings whatever. Franklin Roosevelt once said that the president has to be America's greatest actor. That implies--that may have a pejorative implication; that's not what he meant and that's not what I mean in this case.

But there are times when you're not permitted to have feelings, because if people get you to have feelings, if your adversaries get you to have feelings about yourself and your circumstances, then you're beat before you start. And I basically sort of convinced myself, and I still believe, that most of what happened to me politically was the cost of doing business, at the end of a twenty-year period of very increasingly negative, vitriolic politics, propagated mostly, but not entirely, by the far Right and their alliance with the Republican Party--which is not to say we were blameless. But I think that--we, the Democrats, I mean. But mostly they generated it, beginning really in the late seventies, the basic attempt to delegitimize and de-Americanize your opponent.

And so I just realized that the more I got caught up in all that stuff, even if I was right on the merits, the less able I would be to be president. And that if I gave every bit of physical and emotional, intellectual, spiritual energy I had to my job, that the America people would sense that and they would know that, at least for me, it was still about them.

The Republicans were trying to precipitate this great constitutional crisis for political advantage. And the American people knew things were rocking along pretty well in our country and they didn't want their government to go away. And they certainly didn't deserve to have their president disappear or become diverted.

So when I went in there, my whole mind-set was, I'm going to stand up there and talk to America and talk to them about their jobs, what they owe America. And to be fair, I had a little bit of boost because all the surveys showed that over two thirds of the people thought the impeachment was wrong. And we had just had a stunning election in 1998, the dimensions of which still have never been fully appreciated by the political writers. That is, in the election we lost no Senate seats and gained five House seats. Just by normal historical terms, they should have won. And by the people that were up in the Senate, they should have won between four and six Senate seats, and they should have won thirty House seats. And they out-spent us $100 million in the election. And we won five House seats. Why? Not because the House attacked--the Democrats attacked the Republicans for impeachment, but because the Democrats said, Here's our program. We're for a patients' bill of rights and 100,000 teachers and a new school construction program and paying down the debt. We had four things we ran on.

And all they care about is going after the president. But the main thing was we have a positive message for Americans. So the Republicans made the election about me; we made the election about the American people. And it's the first time since 1822 that a president's party had won seats in the House of Representatives in the sixth year of a presidency--during the presidency of James Monroe, at which time there was virtually no opposition party.

So when I went up there--I don't want to take too much credit for being able to carry it off because I knew where the folks were. I knew where the American people were. And I knew that I had--I just kept telling myself every day, you have been given a precious responsibility; it is an opportunity; your country is in good shape, everything you're working for, everything you believe in--from the economy, the crime policy, the welfare policy, the social policy, the administration--they were working, they were moving the country in the right direction. I felt very strongly of taking the right positions in the Balkans and Northern Ireland, which broke a lot of eggs when I started, and in the Middle East, and all these things I was trying to do around the world.

So I thought that I owed it to the American people to say, Here's where we are and here's where I think we need to go and here are the specific things I'm going to do this year. And I'm going to do your business and I'm going to give the Congress a chance to do your business. That was my whole objective. And I'm very gratified that there was a positive response to it.

Q: Are you worried that you will lose your leverage over your opponents when you leave office? A little bit of that is playing out in the election, where the Republicans want to make the campaign about you.

CLINTON: Well, they can't--for two reasons. One is, unlike them, I have apologized to the American people for what I did wrong, and most Americans think I paid a pretty high price. Most people make a personal mistake, they're not bankrupt or publicly humiliated and strip-searched. But everybody pays a personal price, and most Americans know that the family price is the highest price. So most people are not like politicians and pundits who only keep score in terms of whether you got hurt politically. Most people got this, and they know that I didn't get out of this for free.

That's the first thing. The second thing is, most people know that what they did was not about morality or truth or the law, it was about politics and power and didn't have anything to do with them or their welfare; it had to do with the Republicans and their welfare. And the American people have a pretty good detector about that--except for the ones that were ideologically predisposed there in the first place. So they got that.

And it was never very complicated. The only way that I could have been defeated is if I had played their game. It's like I tell people when Joe Lieberman was picked by Al Gore and they say, Oh, it's a big slap in the face to Clinton. I say, I don't consider it that. I agreed with what Joe Lieberman said. And I also agreed with what Joe Lieberman did when he fought against impeachment.

They never apologized to the country for impeachment, they never apologized for all the--things they've done. So what they tried to do at their convention was to have it both ways. They tried to get the people to keep beating up on me for something that the American people had put behind them. But folks, I think, know that they haven't necessarily put their abuse of power behind them. And so they have to be very careful about how they handle this, because the American people, they say, Look, that's over--this is about him and his family, and that's behind us.

And they've spent, what, $52 million on Whitewater, and what have they admitted--that there was nothing to Whitewater, nothing to the file controversy, nothing to the Travel Office controversy, nothing to my wife's file controversy. And not only that, some people are beginning to know that they knew all that in 1996 and they just kept it going because they couldn't let it go.

There was nothing to the Alexis Herman thing, nothing to the Bruce Babbitt thing. Henry Cisneros pleaded to a misdemeanor, having nothing to do with anything he ever did in office. It was never, ever a question that he did anything wrong in his office. Mike Espy was acquitted by a jury.

So after all this time, and they spent over $100 million on all these special prosecutors and congressional investigations, trying to make [those] the whole story of the administration, and they have yet to come up with one example of official misconduct in office--not one. And there were billions of dollars in free media time spent trying to convince people of that. How in the world the American people ever saw through it--it's a real tribute to them, that they got it.

But I knew every time I gave a State of the Union address and every time I talked during those periods in a press conference that I couldn't win that argument; that the only way I could win was if the public knew that at least there was one person in Washington, D.C. that got up every day and thought about them and worked for them, and that I couldn't become an angry person or I couldn't become a vindictive person--as long as I remembered that I had this precious opportunity and I was showing up for work every day.

And to be fair, I had a lot of help in that. I had a lot of people, including a number of religious leaders who weren't as judgmental as the press. Very interesting. And a lot of the leaders around the world -- Mandela was an enormous help to me during this whole period.

Q: How so?

CLINTON: Well, because he thought it was a bum rap. I don't know if you saw the movie we showed at the convention, but that movie -- that was Mandela speaking the day before Congress gave him the Congressional Gold Medal. He insisted on coming a day ahead of time to bash the whole thing, in the White House. And he was talking about the U.N. giving me the standing ovation--that's when I went there, in the middle of the impeachment.

And Mandela just kept telling me, he said--I used to talk to him a lot about his wife and how he avoided being angry. And that's another thing. I thought about people like Mandela and what he'd suffered, or King Hussein surviving fifty assassination attempts. This stuff, what I went through, was peanuts compared with what a lot of people do to pursue what they think is right in public service.

And Mandela said, You know, they took a lot away from me in those twenty-seven years--my family life, seeing my children grow up, I was physically and mentally abused. He said, I realized that they could take it all except my mind and my heart; I decided not to give them away. He said, You shouldn't give them away, either. He said, You have total control over what you think about and what you feel every day. And it was like light bulbs going off.

And he was very good to me. And so were scores of other world leaders who would call and talk me through it. So I had a lot of help. And my wife and daughter made it possible, too. We just got through it. It was great. In a funny sense, when something like this happens to you, if you survive it, you're living [on] a whole different plane than you ever would have had it never occurred in the first place. And you also have a whole different view toward other people. A lot of things that other people used to do to make me mad I just kind of blow by now, because I realize it's part of life.

Q: Did your approach to the job change over the years?

CLINTON: I learned things as I went along. In the first two years, we made a slew of political errors. And then we made a huge number of decisions that were good for America over the long run. But in '94, I was sort of shackled with a lot of the ragged edges of how I responded to all this incoming fire and how I had to put together a staff, figure out how it was all going to work together with the Cabinet and with the Congress, and get all this stuff done. So there was all that kind of ragged stuff.

And then we passed the economic plan by one vote. We passed the Brady Bill. We passed the assault-weapons ban, we passed NAFTA--all of them wildly controversial. And the benefits, none of them were apparent at the time people were voting, because the economy was already improving rapidly, but people didn't feel it yet; the crime rate was dropping, but people didn't feel it yet; the Brady Bill was beginning to work, but nobody could be absolutely sure that they weren't going to be somehow disadvantaged in their hunting or sporting or whatever. So we lost probably a dozen members of Congress that the NRA took out.

Then we had people disappointed that health care didn't pass and ambivalent about NAFTA. So we had a low turnout of our voters and an inflamed turnout of theirs. And we got our brains beat out in the '94 election, which was a terrible experience for me because I felt that--I was really confident that the economy would pick up, and I was confident that this crime policy was the right policy, and I was confident that we still had to do something about health care and we could go back to it and start chipping away at it, and by '96 people would feel it--but they didn't by '94. So that was a very discreet thing for me. And then I had to kind of rejigger my thinking and figure out how to deal with this Republican majority.

Q: Can you describe the night of the '94 election, how you went to bed that night?

CLINTON: Oh, I felt terrible because I thought all these people were taking bullets for me--not for me, they did it for America. They knew it was the right thing to do. But they wouldn't have done it if I hadn't asked them to do it--in some cases, did more than ask. [Laughter.] And they were paying a price, and I felt--I always felt that by '96, that what we were doing would become apparent if I handled the Gingrich revolution in a proper way, because I thought the country would be in good shape by then. So it was one of the darker nights of my presidency because I felt like all these really good people--and, see, a lot of the people that got beat were the people that were sort of my folks, they were philosophically in line with me and they got elected in districts that could have gone either way, Republican or Democrat, so they were more vulnerable. And it was an awful experience. And I thought about them in '96, too.

I felt much worse about the good people that wouldn't be serving in the Congress than I did the fact that people would be saying that I was finished and all that the next day, because I never really believed that. I thought if I handled the Gingrich majority all right, we'd be fine. I also felt they would overplay their hand, which they did, repeatedly. For three or four years they just kept on overplaying their hand.

But I still see some of those people from time to time that cast that vote on that economic plan, or that stood up and voted for the assault weapons ban or the Brady Bill. You'd be amazed how many--half a dozen or more of them said, I'm still glad I did it, if I had to do it again, I knew I was going to get beat and I'd do it all over again, just look what it did for America.

So it was really beautiful. But that was a very distinct phase of the presidency. And we had all these people who were great on policy and wanted to work together. But it takes a while to put a team together and get it working out.

I remember in '95 I had a couple of presidential scholars come down and talk to me. And one fellow from Harvard looked at me and he said -- and this is '95, when everybody still said we were dead and all that--he said, You're going to be reelected, don't worry about it. And I said, Why. And he said, Because you have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second administration. And he said, You all work together, you don't have this back-biting, you don't have all the things that are so typical of Washington. He said, You've got a coherent policy, you've got a good economic program, and it's working, and I think you'll be reelected. He turned out to be a prophet--thank goodness. [Laughter.]

So there was '93 and '94 where we did a lot of the things that caused us to lose the Congress but basically ensured the success of America. I mean, the economic plan brought us back; the crime bill had a lot to do with bringing down the crime rate. And NAFTA I think was a big plus, and we had a lot of other great initiatives. We had the beginnings of the Middle East peace process with the signing of the Palestinian-Israeli accord, and then the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan. We also began to get involved in the Irish peace process, which was immensely controversial at that time, because no American administration had ever done that before. It was a tough time. It was a very eventful two years, very good for America, but it was contentious. But I look back on it as a very fruitful time for America because some of the most important things I did as president were done in those first two years.

And then [in] '95 and the beginning of '96 was the question of beating back the Contract on America, vetoing the budget, going through the two government shutdowns, standing our ground. And the American people essentially decided that they would stick with us. It was a huge thing. And then later we got the welfare reform bill, which I signed only in its third incarnation, after--I agreed with the Republicans that able-bodied people should be required to work, and that we should let the states design the benefits and the work programs.

I didn't see a big problem in allowing the states to set the monthly benefits since, in effect, they'd been doing that since '74 anyway. A lot of people thought I got rid of the welfare guarantee to families, but in 1996, when I signed that bill, believe it or not, the monthly welfare benefit for a family of three went from a low of under $200 a month in Texas and Mississippi and maybe one or two other states to a high of $655 a month in Vermont.

So the way the law worked, the states were, in effect, setting their own benefit levels anyway. The big objections I had to welfare reform, per se, was--and the reason I vetoed the first two bills--was that they would have, in effect, block-granted Medicaid and food stamps for welfare families, and I didn't think that was right because that went to the welfare of the children. And my whole idea was we had to find a way to reward work and family.

I wanted more money for child care, transportation, and education and training for the welfare recipients. So in the third go-round of the bill the Republican majority agreed to leave in the guarantee for nutrition and medical care and to put in adequate funds on child care and education and transportation.

Now, they did leave in something I really hated--they cut a lot of benefits to legal immigrants, which I didn't like. But I said I'd try to get them back in, and we have now restored virtually all of them. We were able to get that done in the budget fights because the Democrats hung in there with me. And so I think it was a major achievement.

And then, of course, the '96 election turned out very well. And the Democrats picked back up nine seats in the Congress. We lost a couple of Senate seats, but that had more to do with the rotation than anything else. We had three terrible years where--every two years, a third of the Senate comes up, and the first three Senate races in my tenure were all stacked against us, since we had more people up than they did and we had more people retiring than they did. It was just a nightmare. This year is the first time the tilt of the Senate seats is in our favor, where they have more incumbents up, and I think maybe more people retiring. So it's worked out pretty well for us. And I feel--I think we'll do well in the Senate races this time.

Then '97 and '98, we had the balanced-budget agreement and a whole slew of other legislative achievements that were bipartisan achievements. And we had, of course, burgeoning Bosnia in the '95-'96 period. And then we had to deal with Kosovo. And continuing other efforts--we got the breakthrough in the Irish peace process and the Wye River accords, and a lot of other domestic things were happening. And I began to take more executive actions, like applying the patients' bill of rights to all the federal work force and everybody that was federally insured, and beginning to set aside a lot of national monument lands.

Q: Was your philosophy changing over these years?

CLINTON: No. I was learning more about how to do it and exploring what the possibilities were. I didn't have a philosophical change, but I do think one of the things that I learned in the first two years, both with the success of the economic plan and the crime bill and NAFTA, and the failure of health care, is that you can get a lot of change out of the American system, but there's only so much change you can ram through at one time. There's only so much that it can absorb. And the system could not absorb some of the things that had to be done to have a universal system with access to health care for everybody, having gone through the strain of making the tough decisions necessary to get rid of the deficit, and deal with crime--because we dealt with gun safety -- passing all my education reform package, a lot of which passed in the first two years.

And one of the things I hope I've changed about the presidency is that before I ran, I decided what I wanted to do. I mean, really, in pretty excruciating detail. And Paul Tsongas and I were the only two candidates in '92 in the Democratic primary that put out these little booklets with detail, and people would make fun of us and talk about how wonky we were. But we had the biggest crowds in the New Hampshire town hall meetings because people knew that we'd actually talk to them about things.

And every year, [my administration] used the State of the Union as an organizing principle to force ourselves to decide what could we do in the best of all worlds, what do we think we've got a chance to achieve, can we pay for it, do we know how we're going to do it. So that these State of the Union addresses, every one of them--I think that we got better and better at it as we went along. And I don't mean that in a self-serving way, I mean our whole operation--we used it in a very rigorous way to plan for the future.

And so it's wonderful, because you don't have to get up every day and wonder what you're supposed to do. You've got a plan and you execute. And we're still--here it is, 150 days from the end of my term, and we're executing a plan that we laid before the Congress and the country in January in the State of the Union address.

Q: Do you agree with those who have say you used up a lot of your political capital to get through the impeachment period?

CLINTON: No. First of all, there's not a shred of evidence of it. I mean, we continued to do things to help--if there are liberal critics saying that, we continued to do things to help poor people, to help the disability community, to work for racial and ethnic reconciliation, to advance the cause of gay rights. So I just don't agree with that.

And if conservatives say that, we continued to pay the debt down, have a stronger economy, and have a very aggressive position overseas. So there's just no evidence of it. And the truth is, if anything, I gained political capital by enduring it. Our people fought it, all right. They did a terrific job making the counterargument and all that. But by not involving myself so personally in it, deeply, and not letting it dominate my mind and thoughts and time, the more the public supported me in what they were doing, we actually gained political capital.

I think if you look, for example, at what--in '98, at the end, the Congress supported virtually my entire education budget, and most of my other budget priorities. And the same thing happened again in '99, where we had a very, very good year.

There hasn't been nearly enough attention given, I think--and perhaps I'm somewhat to blame for that--on the substance of what we tried to do to change federal education policy, with the biggest increase in higher education access since the G.I. Bill, a huge increase in pre-school, virtually creating from nothing a massive program for after-school programs and mentoring and summer-school support from the federal government, requiring all the states to identify their failing schools and come up with strategies to deal with it. I mean, all these things have had a big impact in that area.

So we just continued to rock along. And, look, this year we've got -- unless some terrible unforeseen thing happens between now and the time you run this article, we will have gotten the China trade bill through, the Africa-Caribbean Basin Initiative through, and a major global AIDS initiative through. I believe my plan for global debt relief, which is a very important thing, will get through. I think that our education program will remain intact and be supported.

We put 100,000 police on the street; we've got another 50,000 police going out there. So I think that--and I think we'll get a minimum wage increase. We might get the patients' bill of rights. And depending on how worried the Republicans are, we might even get our Medicare drug initiative.

So I think this is going--people will look back and be amazed at all the things we've got done in this year, and yet, all we did was do what we always did. We tried to keep anchored in the basic themes and ideas that I laid out in '92 and refined in '96.

And I should tell you this. In '95, Thomas Patterson, who is a presidential scholar now at Harvard, but then at Syracuse?e studied the interaction of the president and the media?nd he said that in '95 I already had kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the previous five presidents, in spite of the fact that we'd made more.

And so if anybody asks me for advise on running for president, the first thing I would say is you have to decide why you want to do it, and it's got to be something bigger than yourself, and it's got to be something fundamentally rooted in the aspirations and the needs of the American people. Then you need to figure out exactly what you would do to achieve your objective, and then go out and run on it, and try to have as much clarity as you can. Because the more you think it through, the more likely you are to be able to succeed. And the more people can't say they're surprised because it's something you've run on, or something you say in your State of the Union address. I'm a big believer in that. I think that's why Al Gore's speech was so successful at the convention. It was like a State of the Union address. There was a lot of the stuff that you always have to have at conventions--here I am, here's what I believe in, here's the kind of person I am--but basically, it was, here's what I want for you in the future.

This is a job. And the election should be viewed by candidates as a hiring decision. And if you're a candidate, you're going to a job interview. The grandest, most wonderful job interview in the whole wide world. And part of it is about dreams. And it's about how you communicate with the people that you work for. But also a lot of it's about just good old-fashioned--you get to define the job, and then what it takes to measure success, and then the public decides whether they want to hire you or not.

It's exhilarating, it's wonderful. There's never been anything like it, and probably never will be. But, for me, it's been just a joy. Even the bad days were good for me. Once I figured out that it was to some extent a cost of doing business, all the incoming fire, it sort of liberated me, and I realized I still have got to go to work. And if I hadn't been lucky, I could still be home doing real estate transactions in a law office in Arkansas.

So I have no complaints and I'm very grateful. I've had a wonderful, wonderful time. It's been good for--a fabulous experience for my family -- for my wife and for my daughter, and I'll always be glad I did it. And I'm still working at it. I loved it. I loved it.