Excerpt
SUMMARY: Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday discussed whether it was fair for President Obama's campaign to criticize Mitt Romney over his role at Bain Capital. He also spoke about the Clinton Global Initiative's efforts to spur job creation. Read the full transcript, or watch the shorter version that aired on the NewsHour.
Significant excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): But if there are three or four months like this last one, where the jobs report is so -- is moving down, some people are saying the president's goose is cooked politically.
BILL CLINTON: I don't agree with that. I think, for one thing, he would be in trouble if that happened and the Congress had passed his whole jobs plan. But they didn't, and they are explicitly advocating -- and so is Gov. Romney -- an approach that looks like the approach the Europeans are trying to get out of, which is austerity first, which drives up unemployment and interestingly enough drives the government deficit up.
And he says, let's grow now and adopt a 10-year budget plan that drives the budget down. They're saying, let's have austerity now and adopt a 10-year budget plan which, according to all the independent analysis, would actually add a trillion or two dollars to the debt because of their big tax cuts. So I think he's really just got to talk to the American people and trust them with the truth here.
This is a very complicated thing. If you go back 500 years, the average financial collapse takes five to 10 years to get over, to get back to full employment -- full employment. If there's a mortgage collapse, which we've had for the last couple of hundred years periodically, it's closer to 10 years. What he's trying to do is to beat that. The American people are - they want things done the day before yesterday, so they don't like to wait 10 years to do anything. And there's too much misery out there. I would say he's on track to beat that pretty quickly by quite a lot.
And America still has the world's largest economy, still the biggest exporter and still has enormous strengths. We are younger than Europe and Japan. We're going to be younger than China in 20 years. We're the most diverse economy in the world. We're importing manufacturing jobs again. We're bringing them home. For the first time since the '90s manufacturing is growing. And it looks like it's going to continue for three to five years.
We're going to be OK. This is the agonizing fits-and-starts phase. Assuming no collapse in Europe, we're going to be OK. And the Europeans appear to be trying to put together a sensible response on the banking side and eurobonds to invest in infrastructure to grow the economy. So if that happens, I think he'll be fine. I think he'll get through it.
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