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Then there's another thing that happens, which is you make mistakes. [For instance,] at the end of the '96 campaign, when it was obvious that the Democratic National Committee, even though I knew nothing about it, didn't have an appropriate vetting operation for some of the contributions. So all we could do was give up the money, codify it all, give it all to the Justice Department and try to fix it. You run a big ole bureaucracy, things are going to happen. And then, you know, those of us with kids, your kid graduates from high school, things happen. I wanted to try to give people a sense of what it is like to be in the middle of this.
On mistakes he made as President
I should have done welfare reform before health care. As soon as I realized [Senate majority leader] Bob Dole wasn't going to do anything on health care, I should have told the American people the truth, abandoned it, and said we're going to do this after the '94 election, we've got to have a bipartisan solution. I hope that in my account here I have persuaded people that the blame for those two big decisions rests entirely with me, because I always thought Hillary and Ira Magaziner got a totally bum rap on this. Those were big, big calls I made and they were wrong. I made a lot of big calls right, but those two I made wrong.
On exhaustion
Almost all the mistakes I've made in my life, personal and public, happened to me when I was so tired I could hardly lift my arms above my shoulders. It's not fashionable to say, but it's true. And I'll bet it's true in the George Bush White House. I bet it's true in every White House that's ever existed. You've got to work like crazy, you have a limited amount of time, you want to do all these things, but you have to be very sensitive to the risk of error.
On succeeding in politics
I think the great trick to a successful run in politics is to have both what you've called the wussy-mommy qualities and the macho-tough qualities. If you're only one or the other, you're going to get into trouble. A party without compassion and without intellect and without appreciation for ambiguity is going to get in trouble in an environment where there are many moving parts, not all of which are under your control. On the other hand, if all you have is empathy and ambiguity and you don't know when to stand and fight and when to say no, then in the end all the sand will run out of the hourglass before you really can prevail.
I think the Republicans are better at understanding how to get and keep power. They've shown that since 1968. The Democrats tend to be more responsible in the exercise of power but sometimes don't understand how to get it or how to keep it. We have to understand, we Democrats, that not all politics is rational and you have to deal with people's fear, their need for security. We have to understand that when the Republicans come at us and paint cartoon-like images of us, even if, like [former Georgia Senator] Max Cleland, we left half our body in Vietnam, they do it for one simple reason--because it's worked so much. And they will keep on doing it until it doesn't work, because they're in business to beat us. We've got to beat them.
On John Kerry