PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE October 6, 1996 Transcript

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JIM LEHRER: Mr. President, first question, there's a major difference in your view of the role of the federal government and that of Senator Dole. How would you define the difference?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, Jim, I believe that the federal government should give people the tools and try to establish the conditions in which they can make the most of their own lives. That, to me, is the key. And that leads me to some different conclusions from Senator Dole.

For example, we have reduced the size of the federal government to its smallest size in 30 years. We're reduced more regulations, eliminated more programs than my two Republican predecessors. But I have worked hard for things like the Family and Medical Leave law, the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, the program to put 100,000 police on the street.

All these are programs that Senator Dole opposed that I supported because I felt they were a legitimate effort to help people make the most of their own lives.

I've worked hard to help families impart values to their own children. I supported the V-chip so that parents would be able to control what their kids watch on television when they're young, along with the ratings system for televisions and educational television. I supported strong action against the tobacco companies to stop the marketing, advertising and sale of tobacco to young people. I supported a big increase in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program.

These were areas on which Senator Dole and I differed, but I believed that they were the right areas for America to be acting together as one country to help individual and families make the most of their own lives and raise their kids with good values and a good future.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Dole, one minute.

MR. DOLE: I think the basic difference is, and I've had some experience in this -- I think the basic difference, I trust the people. The president trusts the government. We go back and look at the health care plan that he wanted to impose on the American people: 1/7th the total economy; 17 new taxes; price controls; 35 to 50 new bureaucracies that cost $1.5 trillion. Don't forget that. That happened in 1993.

A tax increase that taxed everybody in America, not just the rich.

If you made $25,000 as the original proposal, you got your Social Security taxes increased. We had a Btu tax turn into a $35 billion gas tax, a $265 billion tax increase.

I guess I rely more on the individual. I carry a little card around in my pocket called the 10th Amendment. Where possible, I want to give power back to the states and back to the people. That's my difference with the president, and we'll have specific differences later. He noted a few, but there are others.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President, 30 seconds.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I trust the people. We've done a lot to give the people more powers to make their own decisions over their own lives, but I do think we are right when we try to, for example, give mothers and newborns 48 hours before they can be kicked out of the hospital, ending these drive-by deliveries. I think we were right to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, which says you can't lose your health insurance just because you changed jobs or because someone in your family's been sick.

Our government is smaller and less bureaucratic and has given more authority to the states than its two predecessors under Republican presidents, but I do believe we have to help our people get ready to succeed in the 21st century.

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