"IF YOU TRY IT ALL AT ONCE..."

By J.F.O. McAllister, ERIC POOLEY

Late last Friday afternoon, TIME White House correspondents Eric Pooley and J.F.O. McAllister interviewed the President in Washington. Excerpts:

TIME: After the failure of health-care reform and the Contract with America, do people mistrust big promises about what government can do?

Clinton: If government is going to do something, people want it to be clear, discrete and understandable. Take health care: if you try to reform it all at once, you're vulnerable to charges that aren't true but are powerful, like I was trying to have the government take it over. With Kennedy-Kassebaum, we did a big portion of what we needed to do. Now I think we ought to take the next step, which is to provide coverage for families who are working but unemployed for an extended period of time. Then we'll take another step. We're in an era when people don't want promises to be high-flown and unrealistic.

TIME: Have you changed the way you think government can best accomplish things?

Clinton: I've learned that the system simply won't accommodate big changes, even when in theory you think they're warranted, but that with a lot of energy and a lot of persistence you can do a very large number of things, which amount to a major shift.

TIME: Why aren't you out there every day campaigning and advertising for a Democratic Congress?

Clinton: I've worked very hard to raise money for a Democratic Congress, to get a platform we can all run on...But you don't want to talk to voters as if they don't have enough sense to make up their own minds about other elections.

TIME: Senator Dole gets a lot of applause when he says the President sends Chelsea to private school but opposes vouchers to let you send your kids to private school.

Clinton: Until we moved to Washington, my daughter had always been in public schools...In the end we all decided she should go to Sidwell Friends, not only because it's an extraordinary school but because she would have a measure of privacy there that she would not have otherwise. On balance, I think the schools are better than they were four years ago...I've been a big proponent of total public-school choice as well as charter schools...It may be very effective politically to use my daughter as an example, but it is not fair because of her own unusual circumstances, and it doesn't deal with the fact that what [Republicans] want to do [with their voucher program] is to take funds now going to the public schools and give them to private schools when the public schools are already underfunded.

TIME: You're very proud--and justly so--of Chelsea. What of yourself at 16 do you see in her?

Clinton: (Chuckling) I think she's smarter than I am and in much better physical condition than I was at 16; but I see more of her mother in her than me. She has her mother's great sense of character and concern. But she's a lot like me in that she's got a great sense of compassion and feeling for other people. Even though she's not at all interested in politics herself, she cares a lot about public life and the impact of public decisions on people's lives.

A longer version of this interview can be found at Website AllPolitics.com