ALTER: In the ‘92 campaign you focused like a laser on the economy. What’s the theme of this next election, if it’s not the economy? CLINTON: I would run on dealing with the aging of America, making dramatic changes to give all kids a world-class education, dealing with all the remaining challenges of family and work, which are basically health care, child care, family and medical leave, related things. I would run on making America the safest big country in the world. We’ve proved we can bring the crime rate down to a 30-year low, but the country is still too dangerous. I would run on this poverty issue. I think we can now really look toward a time when we don’t have to tolerate these levels of poverty and pockets of unemployment.

Should the candidates be more ambitious in their poverty-fighting ideas? They should be as ambitious as they believe they can be, consistent with main-taining the solid economic policy, which means, in my judgment, continuing to pay the debt down and not imposing too high a tax burden. You don’t want to run the risk of derailing things.

Has Al Gore been too harsh in criticizing the cost of Bill Bradley’s health-care plan? Might that help the Republicans if Bradley is the nominee? Look, if he thinks it’s a mistake, he’s got an obligation to say that. For example, what are the consequences of getting rid of the Medicaid program? What are the consequences to the people in nursing homes? If you spend almost all the non-Social Security surplus on this, what are you going to do about Medicare, where no expert believes you can save it without an infusion of new money? And does that leave any money for education? And then the poverty program I think costs $9 billion a year. So I think these are legitimate questions.

What does your gut tell you about John McCain? He’s an impressive man, and he might catch on, and he might not. He’s got a big financial hill to climb. And Republican voters tend to be less independent in primaries than Democratic voters. They tend to take signals from who they think they’re supposed to vote for–except in New Hampshire. I remember that Buchanan upset Bush in New Hampshire in ‘92, right? And then he goes to South Carolina, which is supposed to be so conservative and so protectionist, and Bush just annihilates him. And Dole did the same thing in ‘96. He had some trouble in New Hampshire, and then he just nailed it in South Carolina. Now, one interesting thing that I’ve not noticed anybody commenting on is that McCain has made a real effort to have a beachhead in South Carolina.

After you leave office, how will you shape the Clinton Center at your presidential library? I don’t want a mausoleum there, or even a museum. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to the architects and with some people in the technology business about how to make it an interactive, live thing, where the eight years of my presidency sort of are thrown into the future, and people learn something about America and how it works and public policy and how people’s lives are affected.

And what I want to do is to have a set of missions that continue my passionate interests as president, without in any way improperly getting in the way of the next president, whoever that may be. And so I’m working on defining that and how to do it. I’m actually quite looking forward to it. I think it will be interesting.

You were joking today about therapy. Do you think it’s possible for an ex-president to have therapy, and would you want to do that? I wasn’t joking about it… This is a crazy question, Jon–why are you asking me this question?

I think people want to know how your pastoral counseling is going. Well, why don’t you ask me that?

All right, let me ask it that way. I still see one of them every week. And I just set up a time to see one of them at the end of this week, before I go on my trip. And it’s going very well. I mean, I’ve worked hard at this. It’s been an incredible and very good experience. But I think that preserving the integrity of it and making it real has, among other things, required a pretty high level of confidentiality and not talking about it so much.

This is a personal thing; it’s not for public consumption. It’s for me and my family. And I think, insofar this has been a good thing, I think it’s freed me up physically and emotionally to be a better president.