THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Raleigh, North Carolina)
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release March 13, 1997
PRESS BRIEFING BY
MARY ELLEN GLYNN
State Capitol
Raleigh, North Carolina
12:37 P.M. EST
MS. GLYNN: That's it. Details on the dinner if you turn off the camera. Details on the -- Ready?
The dinners tonight -- the first one is a DSCC and Senator Graham dinner. It is $5,000 apiece. It will raise a million dollars; that's a combination of both hard and soft money. I can't tell you what the split is. The second one is for the DNC; it's a Saxophone Club event at the Sheraton Bal Harbour. It's $250 apiece for 400 people. And that's all hard money.
Q Do you know the source for the President's statistic on positive interactions before age four, 700,000 positive interactions?
MS. GLYNN: The Washington Post wants to know the answer to that question? No, I don't, but I can get that for you if you like.
Q Would you? I did the math. If a kid's up 12 hours a day it's one positive interaction per minute.
MS. GLYNN: It's important.
All right, anybody else got anything?
Q Do you know anything about the White House view of whether the CPI -- the President to not pushing forward on the CPI is going to break a chance for a balanced budget?
MS. GLYNN: Yes, I think there's a couple of things to say on that. Number one, that the issue of COLAs is not going to go away, it's going to be with us for a long time. And the President is determined that it should be done, it should be technically accurate. That's the most important thing. So it needs to be done right. And, secondly, it needs to be done in a way that the American people see that it's done right. And that is about all we have to say about it at this point in time.
Q Is there a risk for getting to a balanced budget agreement?
MS. GLYNN: I don't want to go any further than that. I'm not going to assess it for you.
Q When you say it needs to done right, I mean, are you saying something -- it needs to be changed?
MS. GLYNN: It needs to be done with technical accuracy. We'll go back to what we've said before about the CPI -- if it is determined that it needs to be done, then we should do it. The President has said this ad nauseam. (Laughter.) No, excuse me, Mike McCurry has said that ad nauseam. (Laughter.)
Q Given all this important stuff that's going on and given the President's own ability to -- why is it best use of two Cabinet Secretaries' time and bring them down to this speech?
MS. GLYNN: Because the President thought that it would be -- number one, it was important for the Secretary of Education to come down here because he gets a chance to visit with the legislature and to push the President's agenda. I think he had some time to talk with a bunch of the state legislators about school standards and testing.
The Secretary of Defense wanted to lend his support to this effort, as well. As you can, there's 115,000 schools that are overseen by the DOD. That's a significant number of children. Also, it gave you a chance to ask the Secretary of Defense some questions that you never get to ask him.
Q Are they going on with him down south?
MS. GLYNN: No, no, they're not going down. They're going home now.
Q Mary Ellen, you didn't say there were 150,000 schools did you?
Q 115.
MS. GLYNN: Yes.
Q Wait a minute, 150,000 students, but that's not the number of schools we have here.
Q We've got 115,000 students in 16 schools in 66 --
MS. GLYNN: We've got 115,000 children in the school system, 66 schools across this country, and 167 more around the world.
Q Which is a total of 233 schools.
MS. GLYNN: Anything else?
Q No.
THE PRESS: Thank you.
END 12:41 P.M. EST