SECRETARY CLINTON: Look, I think whoever runs next time has to have a very clear idea of where he or she wants to take the country and has to run on those ideas, because the election cannot be about personalities, participants sniping, all of the irrelevant stuff the day after the election sort of dissipates, and you wake up and say, okay, now what am I going to do? It needs to be an election about the future.
So win or lose, people know what you want to do. You took it to the country, you tried to build a consensus for it, which can hopefully avoid some of the end runs that we've been seeing in the last few weeks, and then you have to have enough of an understanding of how government works to be able to execute the operational side of it, the slow, hard boring of hard boards as (inaudible) said about politics, there's nothing glamorous about it.
And a lot of what I did as secretary of state, you know, people say, oh, well, what were you doing, well, I was trying to protect internet freedom which is under attack from some of the countries around the world that don't want their people to have access to the internet. I was trying to figure out what we could do about climate change that we could get around the Congress because they weren't going to give anything dramatic, but also was going to fit with our economic impairments, you know, things that aren't – they're not in the headlines, they're in trend lines. So you can't govern from the headlines, you have to be responsive to them, but you have to have a plan about what it is you think that the country can do and then how you can harness people's energies.
Now, I'll end with this. I mean, you know, my father was a veteran of World War II, he was in the Navy for five years. He gets out of the Navy, all he wants to do is restart his very small business, he was a printer of drapery fabrics in Chicago, and start a family with my mother, that was it, you know, that was the GI dream, and get a nice house and raise the family.
So when Truman and Marshall said, you know what, we have to rebuild Europe and we have to support Japan, yes, you know, Germany and Japan were our enemies, and we just lost 400,000 plus people in the war and countless billions of dollars, but we have to do that.
So we're going to have to keep taxing you, Hugh Rodham, my father's name, to rebuild your enemies. My father, who was a lifelong Republican, is like, what is that about, you know, what do you mean? I mean, come on, give me a break.
But we had visionary leaders who said, trust us, and there was enough trust in the system so that people could. We are going to help create a world that will be a more peaceful, more prosperous world and good for the United States.
So when Truman and Marshall came up with what's known as the Marshall Plan, people were not immediately enamored, so they went to businesses, they went to the big banks and the industrial firms, and they sat down and they said, look, you guys are going to need markets, you're going to need consumers to be able to buy your stuff, if we don't rebuild, who knows whether that will happen.
And then a lot of our leaders in businesses and presidents of colleges fanned out across America and made the case. And everybody was speaking with one voice. And we spent about $13 billion, which in, you know, current dollars is 120, 125 billion, rebuilding our enemies, and it was one of the best investments America ever made.
So somehow and I – you know, look, I know we're more cynical. We have a television station for every prejudice, bias and bigotry anyone would want